ShareCenter DNS-320

Some time ago I upgraded my little Netgear Stora with new hard drives and although a little bit fiddly to get up and running it went smoothly, but I was left with a couple of 1TB hard drives just kicking around that I wanted to do something with. It seemed sensible to use these for additional offline storage to back up the data I had on my NAS, so if anything happened to it I always had an offline spare. I tried loads of different linux based solutions from FreeNAS, to ubuntu and although I found some systems that I quite liked, I preferred the idea of having a low power dedicated NAS unit, similar to the Stora, rather than committing a whole PC to the task.

I checked out a few chassis-only options and although I would have preferred another Stora it was quite pricey compared to the ShareCenter, so I went for that one! …..and oh boy, what a mistake that was. It's not often that I get a genuinely bad piece of kit, but unfortunately in this case I did and I'm going to explain why D-Link seriously messed this unit up.

For the uninitiated, the Share Center is one of DLinks Network Attached Storage offerings aimed squarely at the home market. It boasts 2 SATA hard drive slots which enable hot swapping of hard drives with no data loss if in RAID 1 configuration and a maximum storage capacity of 4TB in a RAID 0 configuration.

Styling, hardware and concept are all top-notch, so what is wrong with this unit? Well, the software. It is so ridiculously unintuitive to navigate that I must have spent an hour just figuring out the menu structure and what the options were. There is an utterly pointless set of additional 'apps' that offer no useful functionality whatsoever. I have no idea what D-Link were thinking when they attempting to develop software for what is a nice set of integrated hardware but they seriously messed up and not in the easy to forgive way, there was clearly no attempt to assess the usability of this product after the software was included. I am really really tempted to draw out the organisational structure they should have used to develop this product and map out the integration and testing process but that should be teaching them to suck eggs.

I've spent many hours with this little box, and I still can't get user accounts to work properly, or for one of my windows computers to even be able to log on to it; there is a bug in the software where if you have a user account on your pc with the same name as the unit it will fail to log on – and there is no fix for this. The only usable functionality I have been able to get out of this unit is for some of my computers to be able to use it when there are no security settings in place, which is of no use in most networking environments.

At the end of the day it looks to me like software modules from different providers were bolted together in an attempt to provide 'NAS' functionality but the look, feel, and functionality of the software renders this unit completely useless. I am genuinely disappointed with this unit and D-Link should be ashamed of themselves for releasing untested rubbish to the market. Take my advice, if you are looking for a simple home NAS solution then spend a few more pounds on something better and from a company who actually understands how to deliver software and hardware in a single package, QNAP or Netgear are great examples.

Blowfish, blows

I recently read an article that reported a new vulnerability found in one of the most long lasting and trusted encryption protocols on the internet.  It really sent home to me the issues associated with our online activities and I wanted to share those with you.  Here is the article:

http://lwn.net/Articles/448699/

This article highlights the main reason I started this site. The technology the internet is based on and the security protocols we place are trust in were first conceived decades ago and were not designed for the web we know today. Security is very much a bolt on to a technology that, even though still revolutionary today, is really not suited, by design, to the intended purpose. All it takes is a very minor omission in a line of code to render that code harmful rather than secure. The difficultly here is that we don't know how many omissions exist in the software we use today and so we need to be more careful than we might think to ensure we stay safe.

Casting my mind back to those management training courses at work where they roll out the health and safety courses reminds me of the swiss cheese model. This is a very simple model that says there are many barriers that prevent us from getting hurt, but if all the holes in the cheese line up then an accident happens (which is bad). The more barriers between the hazard and the person the better. We need to adopt this same approach when thinking about computers and our online activities. Relying on just one barrier has the potential to allow a flaw in the software code that creates that barrier to harm us. I use the term 'harm' exceedingly loosely, but I hope you get the point. We need to ensure we think a little bigger. I will expand on this concept in future blogs as I think this really sows the seeds for responsible online behaviour. By understanding that those things which should be secure are not, allows us to put in contingencies so we have a better chance of not being caught out.

Dave-Bytes Website v0.1 is up and running

Looking back, its hard to believe that I only started hosting the site 2 days ago and have most of the basic features up and running.  So its official, http://www.dave-bytes.com is finally off the ground.  Now the hard work starts in pulling all the material together for it.

Okay, so where did it all start.  Well, I've always been into computers and networks and in all honesty, more of the network than the computer side.  I just love the way that networks use some amazingly resilient protocols that just work.  Unfortunately, these protocols have been around for decades and security wasn't designed in from the outset because they weren't designed for hostile environments like the internet, but secure offices and military installations.  Some time ago, I realised that there is some fairly basic stuff that we have to do to keep ourselves safe online, unfortunately, although a lot of these things are just common sense, they arn't common practice.  I saw the need for a site that just focuses on individual internet security and so starts my mission to educate the masses........

I've blogged enough already about the site content, so now I wanted to cover the process I went through to get the site off the ground.  For most of us techies, web hosting is pretty much meat and gravy kind of stuff.  We've had web servers running at home for years, but this time, I wanted a hosted solution.  So the first job was selecting someone to register the domain with.  Well, there are a lot of big names out there, but all I wanted was a cheap one.  So I went with GoDaddy as they are a big company, fairly cheap, have data centres all over the world and most importantly also offered a cost effective mail solution.  As a quick aside, I intend to configure my own mail server at home as a long term mail solution, but wanted to put the framework in place with a host (ie, domain name and mx forwarding) but that's a story for another day.

So, was it hard?  Well, no, it was painless.  The domain registration was quick and easy.  Selecting a hosting package was also easy.  Linking the domain name to the hosting package was a few easy and obvious clicks in the configuration webpage, and it was even obvious how to upload files using the web browser ftp software.  The website ftp programme was very limited not allowing me to upload directories and only transfer files from within a folder so if you are thinking of running your own site where you write the actual web pages yourself and then upload them, I would highly recommend the opensource FileZilla ftp programme.  It's just so simple and works.  I included a forum as part of the site which has many hundreds of files of and folders and so an automatic solution was essential.  The other thing that is a god send was the mysql databases that are included as part of the package.  For the uninitiated, if your website has the ability to store user information like comments or blogs then it needs to have a database somewhere to store this information and that is what mysql does.  Its amazing how many different databases you actually need for a website...one for the forum....one for the blog ...... one for comments and that's just for starters.

So, what went wrong.  Well, nothing major really.  The main lesson I learnt was that domain registration includes the address of the holder and contact information like a phone number and email address and this is available to everyone on the internet.  I knew this was going to happen but just not where the information was going to come from and was hoping I could change it to something other than my home address.  I couldn't.  So, I've had to employ a third party to act as an intermediary to remove this info.  It's all done and I'm nicely safe again, but it was an extra step I'd preferred to not have had to take.

If you get a chance, please check out my website, and I'd love to hear your views on it.

Happy Computing!

 

Finally, the website is up, albeit under construction

It has long been an aim of mine to get a website up and running.  I'm not one of those people who considers squarespace a serious option - as they say - no pain, no gain, so I've done it mostly from scratch (and it shows).  Well, it's been painful, but I finally have the website up and running.  http://www.dave-bytes-com.  It's up, but still has a long way to go.  The current homepage is very lame and needs some serious styling before it's anywhere near ready.  The forums are up which has taken by far the most amount of work, but they too need styling to blend in with the rest of the site.

I can go to bed tonight content I have achieved something, however, there is a massive list of things to do still. 

Night night internet, see you tomorrow ;)

Stora Disk Upgrade: Success

I mentioned a week ago that I was debating what to do about my slightly too full network storage box, the netgear stora.  Well, I decided to go for the upgrade option rather than to replace the NAS with a new unit of greater capacity.  So, I popped off to my favourite online purveyor of digital wares and acquired 2 x 2TB caviar green western digital drives. I've been a fan of the WD drives now for many years.  I particularly like the way that WD has structured the product line into Green, Blue and Black tiers so its easy to select the right drive for the job; with the black series being persistently close to the top of the performance charts and the green drives being at the bottom end of the price charts.  I went for the low cost, low performance end because the limiting factor on NAS boxes isn't the hard drive, its the network speed, so anything with greater performance is simply a waste of money.




It's worth me just mentioning quickly the Stora's architecture.  It's a 2 hard drive NAS unit that provides digital storage for users on the network.  It can act as a DLNA server allowing music, pictures and videos to be streamed over the network to games consoles and other computers.  It is compatible with Apple products supporting an itunes interface, and provides shared network folders for windows or linux computers to access.  The drives can be logically arranged in one of two formats; either mirrored so that all data is duplicated on both drives offering maximum redundancy or striped so that storage capacity is maximised as the full capacity of both discs is available to the user, but offers no redundancy.  I have mine in the mirrored format.  There are three lights on the front of the unit, the first is a power light, the second for hard drive 1 status and the third for hard drive 2 status; green for good and amber for a problem.

With both drives containing all data it makes the upgrade a lot simpler.  In theory, I don't have to copy all the data to another drive as the Stora is designed to allow a failed disc to be replaced with a new one.  I seriously considered copying all the data to a 2nd location but decided that as both discs in the Stora had an identical copy of my data on them I already had a high degree of redundancy.  If I encountered any problems, I could always put the removed drive back in to recover.

 So, first I powered off the system.  It is designed to allow hot-swapping of drives, but I decided the likelihood of damaging a drive whilst the heads were still spinning was a little too high for my liking.  I removed the first drive, replaced it with the first new 2TB, and turned the unit back on.  As expected, one of the little drive lights was amber indicating a problem with the new disk.  A quick trip into the unit's management web page and it reported the problem that disk 1 was not ready, had detected the new drive and asked what to do.  I told it to include the new drive into the array.  The unit then formatted the new disk and copied all the data from the original disk onto the new disk.  This was a surprisingly quick process and took a little under 2 hours.

 

Once complete, I checked the unit was functioning and then powered it off again.  Removed the last original disk and replaced it with the new 2TB disk and powered the unit on again.  As before, it detected the new disk but needed to know what to do with it.  Another trip to the management web page and I added the new disk to the array and the formatting and data copying commenced again.  2 hours later this process finished.  This was when I realised that although the new drives were working fine and had been recognised by the unit, the partition tables had also been copied allowing only the original 1TB of space to be available.  The only way I was able to make the full 2TB available was to copy all my data to the removed drives by putting them in my desktop computer and to then reformat the entire Stora.  This last step was somewhat annoying, but I now have a 2TB unit with plenty of space on it.  

It is worth mentioning that the Stora is designed to be easy to use, so there are no disk partitioning options at all.  The only option is to have either a mirrored or striped configuration.  All capacity on the drives will be used.  In mirrored mode, the maximum capacity is the size of the smaller drive.  

I've yet to hear whether there is any potential to expand this unit further, but suspect that as the hardware is a few years old now, 2TB is probably the maximum disk size this unit can accommodate.  For me, this is more than enough for the next year or so, and after that I will start looking at systems with space for more than 2 disks.  Currently, QNAP is my favourite, but let's see what comes out in the next year.

Time to Byte

I've been into computers ever since I was a kid, all-in-all that's almost 30 years ago.  Wow, blimey, that's a long time, and all this time I've quietly sat by watching the technological world do its thing.  I've helped the odd friend or family member in need along the way.  Well, quite a lot more than a few, but hey, who's counting.

I'm an engineer, and in true engineering style I believe that things shouldn't just 'be' instead they should 'be useful'.  As such, I love the usefulness of computers, the systems that are used to connect them together, the plethora of protocols that can be used and services that can be run. 

Never before has the internet been such a wondrous place, so many devices, so much software, so much potential and enthusiasm to use it, and now it needs a hand in the right direction.  Does that sound a bit stuck up?  Well, yes, you are right, it does, most people know more than enough about computers and the internet to get by.  The problem as I see it is that there is a lot of good common sense out there, but not that much good practice.  Everyone knows it, but everyone forgets from time to time to apply those techniques that keep them, their families and their computers safe.

With all this wonderfulness comes the bad side, having every computer able to talk to every other computer brings with it problems.  People who want to steal, people who want to destroy, people who want to deface.  I don't like those people and want to help others to avoid them. 

So I decided it was time, and I was ready, to publish my own internet security website.  A place where I could have a free no-nonsense guide for fellow webscape dwellers to learn.  You may have noticed that this isn't my website.  When I started to sketch out what the site would look like I came up with this:

That took me about 20 minutes to do, is by no means complete and the first 10 of those minutes were spent finding a mind mapping tool I liked.  That short exercise made me realise that I have a lot of content to produce before I can even contemplate getting a site up and running.   So here was the inspiration for Dave Bytes, a place where I can start to blog about internet and computer security whilst slowly building the website in the background.

To Stora or not to Stora

About a year ago, I bought a Netgear Stora, and it has been one of the best purchases I have made.  For the uninitiated it looks like this:

Not much to look at is it?  Well, its what's on the inside that counts.  This little beauty connects to my home network and gives me 1TB of network storage.  That's a good start, but what's really cool about it is that I can access it from anywhere in the world, it acts as an itunes server, it lets me stream movies, audio and pictures to other devices in my home, like my PS3.  Oh, and if the hard drive fails, there is a spare one in there with everything backed up to it.  So, I like it, and so what, well, did I mention, it was pretty cheap too.  If you bought one today the chassis would cost about £70 and disks are £40 each.

Anyway, that's enough of the preamble, the problem I have is that it is now full.  Yup, you heard right, in the space of 12 months I've stuffed the little thing full of movies, tv series, music, and pictures (including a few too many uncompressed SLR piccies too from various holidays).  So what to do?  Well, I could delete some stuff, I could archive it off the network onto other computers or external hard drives, or I could even delete some of the lesser used content.  I believe that a well organised network is going to be more sustainable and reliable than a disorganised one and so to fragment my data doesn't sound like a great idea.  Its time to get more storage and more storage on the network.  Hmmm, this sounds like it might cost.

As a true engineer, its time to list my options:

• Upgrade existing disks (put larger ones in)
• Pro's - Cheap ~£60 per 2TB drive
• Cons - Compatibility risk, not straight forward data migration
• Buy new NAS unit
• Pros - Easy data migration, loads to choose from, expandable
• Cons - More expensive, starting at £280 for a chassis then £60 per disk
• Do nothing
• Pros - cheap, low labour cost
• Cons - still have nowhere to store data, unit becomes full, unreliable

There are some really nice new units out at the moment, my personal favourite is the QNAP:

Its not as cheap as the Stora, £280 for the box and £60 per drive.  It holds up to 4 drives, so that comes in at £520 for what is close to 6TB of storage.  In my experience, I have been doubling the volume of data every year, so this should give me about 2.5 years worth of use.  Here is where the problem lies.  Technology moves on at a startling rate, by the time I fill this up it will be obsolete, spare drives will no longer be available and it will have cost £200/yr.  As I can get another year's worth of use out of the Stora for £120 quid, I think I'll go for the upgrade option, slightly more fiddly but in a years time NAS' will be more prevalent in the home user market and hopefully they will be cheaper.  Shame really, I was looking forward to getting a new toy ;)