Last week I purchased a NAS box, and a 500gb hard disk to go with it. I’ve wanted one for a while now and decided it’s a good time to get one. After a lot of browsing round online computers shops such as www.overclockers.co.uk and www.novatech.co.uk I decided on the Icy Box 2001 series from novatech.co.uk. It seemed like it was perfect for what I need, and it is. It’s fantastic! I’ll list the servers it has on it:

  • Samba (Windows file sharing)
  • FTP
  • NFS
  • DHCP
  • Print Server
  • iTunes Media

Currently i’m using Samba within my parents house, and FTP from Uni. I’ve set up a nice cronjob on my iMac to FTP all my uni work to it in a tar file once a night. It works really well for my parents too. They have a mapped network drive, so it looks like any other windows drive on their Microsoft Vista machine. To which they keep backups of their photos and emails. The iTunes server is really good too. It transmits all your music to a shared folder in your iTunes without you having to do anything, all you need to do is search for the song you want and double click it to play.

Once issue I have had with it is the online admin page crashing and not responding until the server is hard rebooted. However, to overcome this issue I found a nice hack to enable telnet, and the program that fires the http daemon off. For anyone who has the IB-NAS1000/NAS2000/NAS2001 Icy Box here is a little tutorial for you:

  1. In your web browser go to: http://<ip_of_your_nas>/cgi/telnet/telnet.cgi. Here is a hidden admin page for telnet. Tick the check box and then the submit button.
  2. Open up a telnet client, or Windows Command Prompt and type telnet <ip_of_your_nas>
  3. Login with user name: root and password: raidsonic. (These logins should work! If not try a google search)
  4. In the command line type /etc/rc.d/S97thttpd.sh start (This will start you thttpd server! (Obviously))

And that’s how you enable telnet and restart your httpd daemon. If you’re confident with cronjobs, add the command to a 15min cron and you’ll never need to send the command again!

So over all I’m very happy with my NAS. I’m lucky I know something about Linux and the way samba works, other wise I probably wouldn’t have been able to fix the issues, however over all it’s a very good piece of kit.