For the time being, I don't know how to rename it to be "mintaka". More on that later.

Installation of the new NAS is surprisingly easy. You plug it into the wall. You plug it into your LAN. Then you put their CD into the drive of your main computer and let it run.

It installs a package called "WD Discovery". You run that, and it searches the LAN and finds the NAS. The NAS is preformatted to run in RAID 1 mode, and it has two predefined main directories called "Download" and "Public". You click another button and it automaps those two directories. What with me doing some clicking, I ended up with Download as X: and Public as Y:.

But those didn't show up on Alcyone's "My Computer" window until after I rebooted Alcyone. Now they're there.

The comments on NewEgg's sites about speed are right. I copied 15 GB of large files onto it from Alcyone, and the sustained transfer rate was 13 MB/s. It's not impressive, but it is fast enough to be useful.

Another button on the "WD Discovery" tool supposedly allows you to configure the NAS. When you click it, the browser pops up and connects to the NAS.

And it asks you for account name and password. I don't know what they are, and so far I haven't found an answer in the documentation, so I'm not just sure how I get past that point.

Presumably once you do, that's where you could decide to switch to RAID 0 (which I don't intend to do) or whatever. It's also where you could change the device name. Right now it thinks it's named \\mybookworld and I'd like to change that to \\mintaka.

I'd also like to change its IP. Right now it's using 192.168.1.110, which is one of the IPs I'm managing with the DHCP server on Deneb Railgun. I'd rather assign it a permanent IP (192.168.1.4). (192.168.1.1 is Regulus, the Qube. 192.168.1.2 is Deneb, the WHS NAS. 192.168.1.3 is Railgun, the Netgear wifi/ethernet hub. And all my client computers have IPs in the range of 192.168.1.100+. Railgun DHCP manages a range of 192.168.1.110-150 IIRC.)

The problem is that if, for whatever reason, Railgun decides to change it, then all the mounts and links fail.

So now to do a more serious search of the documentation to figure out how to log in to the darned thing.

UPDATE: Aha! Documentation page 87 says that the default login account name is "admin" and the default password is also "admin".

Of course, once you're in you can change that, and I'm going to just on general principles.

UPDATE: Now it has a permanent IP. And the discovery tool knows that it's named "mintaka". However, the \\mintaka path doesn't work. The automatic assignments are to the IP directly. Which is ugly, but I guess it works.

I suppose I could add "mintaka" to that file which substitutes as a local version of DNS, but I'm having a senior moment and I can't remember its name or its path. I thought it was about three directories down in \windows\System32 but I can't find it.

I had to do that for Regulus (the Qube) too, so it's not really surprising. (And one time I added DotClue to it, which means that when I'm suffering from a complete DNS failure that's the only site I can reach.)

Ha! Found it! \windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

UPDATE: And one short reboot later, \\mintaka works.

For all practical purposes, setup is now complete. If I wanted to set up Mintaka to do backups, or stuff like that, then there'd be more work to do. But I don't. All I want is lots of disk space, and now I have that.

If I ever want Saten or Arcturus to access Mintaka, I'll have to install WD Discover on them too. But for the time being that's not needed.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: I'm pulling 391G off of an old WD USB drive and copying it onto the new NAS. It's been running about half an hour so far. Windows estimates it'll take 19 hours total. That turns out to be less than 6 megabytes per second. The difference between this one and the previous one is that the faster one was made up of huge files (50-150 megabytes each). This one is scads of small ones (less than a megabyte).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 09:41 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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