Posted on

Fiddling with FreeNAS

A few months ago I purchased a HP Microserver because it had become necessary to improve my storage arrangements at home.  Before then I had stored things, well actually everything, on a ReadyNAS Duo that had a been running on a pair of 500GB that mirrored each other for redundancy.  This was not an ideal situation and because I was running out of space I had considered removing the mirror.

Switch to something like the HP Microserver seemed ideal because:

  1. I could run whatever I wanted on it because it was effectively a PC in its own right.
  2. I would have 8TB of storage which was a vast improvement over the ReadyNAS.
  3. 4 drives would give me improved redundancy and there would be various configurations that I could choose to suit my needs.

Skipping forward to today I have had my Microserver for a good few months and have run it using FreeNAS but now I’m getting that nerd itch because it’s not running quite exactly how I want it.

Currently I have it so that it’s running FreeNAS and Serviio on top of that to serve my music up to my PS3, etc. but the current method of having to dig into the console to get it all working again every time FreeNAS releases an update is not sitting well with me.

With this in mind I’ve just decided to follow this guide over on the FreeNAS forums and set up a build environment which with any luck I will be able to use to slipstream Serviio into FreeNAS.

Cross your fingers!

Posted on

Connecting to a linux share from windows

I’ve been having one of those annoying problems connecting to my NAS that I wasn’t able to pin down.  Finally after a bit of a rummage on the internet I stumbled across the following on Tomshardware.com:

Hi all,
I have  a similar problem with Ubuntu Server and Windows Vista and Seven.
I have created a share on Samba with user and password. I opened some ports on the firewall to allow access outside.
I can see the share and mapping the disk with this command:

NET USE Z: \\publicIP\share “PASSWORD” /USER:user

The problem is that: When I’m opening a file (Excel for example) this file is always in ready only mode. With Windows XP everything works fine.
Can this fix resolve my problems?

Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Local Security Policy
Local Policies – Security Options
Network security: LAN Manager authentication level
Send LM & NTLM responses
Minimum session security for NTLM SSP
Disable Require 128-bit encryption

I basically had the same issue.

With mine it all came down to the fact that windows didn’t like “multiple” connections using different usernames, in my case one username and one anonymous access.

So, if anyone else comes across this bloody simple yet irritating problem do the following:

  1. Run “net use” from a command prompt to see if you are already connected to \\share on your windows PC.
  2. If you are then sever that connection using “net use” again with an added “/delete” switch.
  3. Reconnect using the login and password using either “net use” or explorer.

Sounds simple but it took me ages to figure out purely because I wasn’t logging in to begin with!