Looking to buy and NAS

[gisnerd]

Hi, I'm a noob to Puppy, so please forgive if I've posted in the wrong place.

I'm considering buying an NAS to plug into my router, rather than adding disk space to both old PC's I have. The one I run Puppy on is almost 10 years old, and every time I try to add hardware it is a pain. Nothing ever works with it. It runs Puppy just fine though!

So I thought I'd ask before buying. Am considering:

Buffalo Technology LinkStation Live 1.0TB,
Western Digital My Book Live 1 TB,
Iomega 1 TB Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition 34763

All are around $100, and all have mixed reviews on Amazon. The Iomega is the only one that specifically mentions Linux, but it does not specify Puppy or Ubuntu. I actually could live with a 500 GB drive, if it were cheaper, but I don't find any that small for sale now.

My needs are fairly light, with photos and home video taking the most space. Perhaps streaming music, too. Am currently living in about 150 GB spread between 2 PC's, but am out of space on both now.

Does anyone have experience with any of the above, or alternatives in the same ball park, cost and size-wise? Or, if NAS is a stupid idea, please let me know.

Thanks much.

[tempestuous]

I offer no comments on any of those particular products, but generally NAS devices run CIFS/SMB server software, which any Linux system (including Puppy) can access via the Samba client utilities.

There are other forum members here who can provide more expertise regarding Samba, but I think that all you should need to do is go to
Menu > Network > Pnethood Samba shares

[mulluysavage]

Are there any considerations when buying rather than making a NAS these days, such as DLNA/UPnP?

[Lobster]

The Iomega is the only one that specifically mentions Linux

Buy that. Other penguins will.
Support will be more likely.
If it runs on Linux it can run on Puppy.

[mulluysavage]

I would like to support hardware that supports Linux. However, it appears that the Iomega is criticized in a lot of reviews for not having sufficient cooling. They Synology NASs look really good, but for some reason don't do SMB as far as I can tell. How easy/possible is it to set up a NAS with puppy if all you have is the following protocols:

CIFS
AFP
NFS
FTP
WebDAV
iSCSI
Telnet
SSH
SNMP

[pemasu]

I know almost nothing about cifs/smb, but when you compile the kernel, cifs has replaced the smb and smb is considered obsolete/deprecated.

So...at kernel level cifs provides the smb funcionality nowadays.

[mulluysavage]

Perhaps I simply misunderstand - are SMB and CIFS the same thing?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... sage_Block

[pemasu]

I consider cifs as newer implementation of smb.

When the NAS has cifs support, it means that samba client should see the NAS shares.

Thats how I see it.

[gisnerd]

Appreciate the feedback, everyone. I still haven't sprung for an NAS. Am making do with an external USB drive for now. I'm starting to think maybe I should just share that out from my Puppy box. Windoz can access a share from Puppy, right? How would I do that, exactly? In effect, I'd be making Puppy my NAS. I know performance would be poor, but the price is right...

Thanks again.

[rcrsn51]

I'm starting to think maybe I should just share that out from my Puppy box..

Read here.

[raffy]

if all you need is drive storage, why not buy USB-attached storage? If you have extra IDE drive, you can just buy USB drive enclosure (this can have own power adapter).

[tater]

I'm starting to think maybe I should just share that out from my Puppy box..

Read here.

Yes, this is a great solution for a NAS.

I was able to put to use an old box that was doing nothing but collecting dust and put it to great use.

Following rcrsn51's excellent tutorial made it easy and fun.

I can stream music and videos to my network and using wary 511, it's been rock solid and performs fantastic on this P3 600 with 256mb ram running headless.