Build your own NAS for 66K

Continued from page: 1

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Installing the OS

After assembling the system, configure the RAID Level on top of the hard disk. You can choose any level of RAID supported by your motherboard. Our motherboard gave us the choice of using RAID Levels 0 to 5 and 10. As RAID 5 is best suited for jobs that need redundancy with performance, we opted for it. We dedicated one 300 GB HDD for the OS, OS backup and applications and built a RAID 5 array of the other four disks. The logic behind keeping a separate HDD for OS hard disk is simple-if your OS is damaged, your still data volume still remains. Also at any point of time, you can fix a new HDD, install the OS and your NAS is ready. After building the RAID volume, we got a redundant single partition of 860 GB. The loss of space is due to the parity done by the RAID partition.

The next step is to install Windows 2003 R2 on top of the device. This is similar to installing Windows on any machine except one thing. When the
installation starts, you have to press F6 and specify the RAID Controller's driver to Windows. You can obtain the driver for your RAID controller from the Driver CD of the motherboard.

To create a new share of any type (NFS, HTTP, SMB or DFS), all you have to do is to go to this link and provide the path and filename of the share and then select the protocol

Once Windows 2003 R2 is installed all you need is to install two more components. These are the set-up files for Appliance Kit and Storage Server Feature Pack. You can download both from Microsoft's website. After downloading, first install the Appliance Kit and then the Storage Server Feature Pack. Installation is straightforward and you just have to follow the wizard. After all this is done, reboot the machine and you NAS is ready to rock.

Configuration
There are two different ways in which you can configure this NAS. As this is a Windows NAS, you can always log on to Windows and configure it. But won't you rather like to configure it remotely without the need of logging in to the OS? Thats where the Appliance Kit and Storage Server feature pack caome in. They install a management portal on top of the NAS that you can access from any browser remotely.

Set quota for users by going to this link and selecting the name of the user. Then you can specify the warning and restrict level of the user from the same interface

By default, this portal runs on https://<your-nas-ip>:8098. From this window, you can do almost all types of NAS related configurations like creating users, groups, volumes and partitions, making shares and assigning rights, etc.

You can even directly run remote desktop on top of Explorer or shutdown/reboot the server.

Page(s)   1  2