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Forum Discussion
Some advice for a prospective buyer
I'm about to pull the trigger on purchasing a ReadyNAS Ultra4 with a few 2TB hard drives to fill it up, but was hoping if someone would be able to give me some advice and do some expectation management.
I currently run a file server that's a simple Windows XP machine that's been tweaked to provide RAID-5 in software (as described on Tom's Hardware). It's worked admirably for me for five years, even surviving the death of a hard drive on two separate occasions. The RAID-5 drive shows up as one large drive, and I have subfolders on it shared out for each member of the family, plus a "Shared" folder that has all of our family pictures, music, and so on. The file server holds all of the documents that we make, all of our pictures, and so forth. We also use it to stream movies from, and it works perfectly fine for that.
The file server also acted as a VPN server using the built in Windows Incoming Connections software, but that was somewhat unreliable, dropping connections randomly after a few minutes to a few hours. I did like the idea of being able to VPN to my home file server from anywhere, and access all of my documents. The ability to have an encrypted tunnel to the web also appealed to me when using public wifi. However, the continuous dropped connections coupled with the uneasiness of having ports forwarded through my firewall to my file server finally convinced me to stop using it as a VPN server.. but I'd like that capability again.
One big wrinkle in my life is that my wife and I will be geographically separated for a few months because of work. While I'm fairly tech savvy, she doesn't like fiddling with computers at all. She just wants things to work. I'd like her to be able to access our file shares through the Windows Explorer interface even though she's going to be halfway across the country from me, and do it with the absolute minimum of fuss, and with as much reliability as possible. Thus, the Windows built in VPN client doesn't seem to be a viable solution because of the reliability issue.. but it does work perfectly for me for being as transparent as possible, using the native Windows Explorer interface.
The ReadyNAS seems like it'd work well for serving up files to the household, and the ReadyNAS Remote software sounds like it'd fit the bill for offering remote access to the file server as seamlessly as possible. However, the ratings for ReadyNAS Remote on the download page seems low (2.8 stars out of 5?). Does the ReadyNAS Remote software work well? Is everything encrypted during transfer?
Is there any way to use the ReadyNAS as a web proxy / VPN-ish client to provide a secure encrypted tunnel from wherever my wife or I are using public wifi access to the file server, and from there out to the web?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
I currently run a file server that's a simple Windows XP machine that's been tweaked to provide RAID-5 in software (as described on Tom's Hardware). It's worked admirably for me for five years, even surviving the death of a hard drive on two separate occasions. The RAID-5 drive shows up as one large drive, and I have subfolders on it shared out for each member of the family, plus a "Shared" folder that has all of our family pictures, music, and so on. The file server holds all of the documents that we make, all of our pictures, and so forth. We also use it to stream movies from, and it works perfectly fine for that.
The file server also acted as a VPN server using the built in Windows Incoming Connections software, but that was somewhat unreliable, dropping connections randomly after a few minutes to a few hours. I did like the idea of being able to VPN to my home file server from anywhere, and access all of my documents. The ability to have an encrypted tunnel to the web also appealed to me when using public wifi. However, the continuous dropped connections coupled with the uneasiness of having ports forwarded through my firewall to my file server finally convinced me to stop using it as a VPN server.. but I'd like that capability again.
One big wrinkle in my life is that my wife and I will be geographically separated for a few months because of work. While I'm fairly tech savvy, she doesn't like fiddling with computers at all. She just wants things to work. I'd like her to be able to access our file shares through the Windows Explorer interface even though she's going to be halfway across the country from me, and do it with the absolute minimum of fuss, and with as much reliability as possible. Thus, the Windows built in VPN client doesn't seem to be a viable solution because of the reliability issue.. but it does work perfectly for me for being as transparent as possible, using the native Windows Explorer interface.
The ReadyNAS seems like it'd work well for serving up files to the household, and the ReadyNAS Remote software sounds like it'd fit the bill for offering remote access to the file server as seamlessly as possible. However, the ratings for ReadyNAS Remote on the download page seems low (2.8 stars out of 5?). Does the ReadyNAS Remote software work well? Is everything encrypted during transfer?
Is there any way to use the ReadyNAS as a web proxy / VPN-ish client to provide a secure encrypted tunnel from wherever my wife or I are using public wifi access to the file server, and from there out to the web?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
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- Ooops - forgot to add some other requirements.
Seeing as how my File Server has gone through two failed hard drives, I know that hardware fails, and I back up the data on the file server to an external hard drive, plus burn really critical stuff (wedding photos, etc) to DVD for archiving. I'm pretty sure that the sales-speak on the ReadyNAS website says so, but just to make sure - it's easy to recover from a failed hard drive with these devices, with no loss of data, right? And since I won't fill up the entire ReadyNAS with 4 drives at once, it's easy to just slide in a new drive to expand capacity with a minimum of fuss? - regarding recovery from failed hard drive, yes normally it is as simple as hot-pulling the bad drive, then (carefully) hot-inserting the new drive. Nas will then do a quick smart test, then start initialization of the drive followed by resyncing the array.
all that said, if a second drive fails while the raid is non-redundant, then you will of course lose the array and your data. This will happen for any raid-5 type device, as the array is only designed to withstand 1 drive failure.
As such, its often said that raid is never a substitute for backups, and seems you already aware by having external drives and burning to dvd.
Expansion is as simple as adding the new drive to an empty slot, or (carefully) hot-removing an older drive and hot-adding the larger replacement drive.
with all 4 drives used and the default x-raid2 mode, it will take replacement of 2 drives with a larger size in order to expand. - I've got a number of ReadyNAS devices and I have suffered a number of drive failures. I've documented all of my drive failures, as well as expansions (horizontal & vertical) in this thread to give folks an idea of what's involved: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=25794&p=269565#p298959
Bottom line: it just works. Having said that, RAID devices are not a substitute for a backup. Have a look at this document: http://www.readynas.com/?p=3153
At home, I backup my primary ReadyNAS (Pro) to a secondary unit (NVX) and at work, I backup all of my servers to an on-site ReadyNAS 2100 and then replicate the primary 2100 to 2 remotely-located ReadyNAS 2100s.Riddlefox wrote: he ReadyNAS Remote software sounds like it'd fit the bill for offering remote access to the file server as seamlessly as possible. However, the ratings for ReadyNAS Remote on the download page seems low (2.8 stars out of 5?). Does the ReadyNAS Remote software work well? Is everything encrypted during transfer?
Yes, it works quite well, encrypts the data and is very firewall-friendly (no port-forwarding involved) and does not require knowing the IP address at home. I think at times people have complained about performance issues, but I can't speak to whether it was a limitation of their ISP upload speed or some other factors.
You could also try WebDAV, however, it requires port-forwarding and last time I tried it in Windows 7 it was a PITA. It also requires knowing your home IP address, so you'll need to use a dynamic DNS service.
http://www.readynas.com/?p=126 - The ReadyNAS just arrived. Hope it works out as advertised!
Is there any way to do a web browsing tunnel so that I can surf from a public wifi hotspot and not worry about people eavesdropping? - You want ReadyNAS Remote -- http://www.readynas.com/remote.
- Not connect to my files remotely - do web surfing, like I could with my VPN.
Gotta say, a week into ownership with this thing, it's a very mixed bag.
Performance wise, it's fine. But the setup of it is incredibly annoying. I've created two users - one for me, and one for my wife. I can't access our home shares through Windows Explorer using, I presume, CIFS. I'm not sure if it's a Windows issue or a ReadyNAS issue, but I never ran into so many complications as when I was just sharing folders from my Windows-XP based file server. I'm still banging my head against the problems.
One neat thing - I have shares set up that refused to accept usernames/passwords to let people access them. So I gave up on trying to have a modicum of security, and just set it to guest access having default read/write capability. Yet, when I try to map the drives through Windows, it still asks for a username and password. When I supply one, Windows then pops up asking me to select a digital certificate (we use smart cards to log in to our work's webmail, so the window is populated with those certs). Very bizarre, very frustrating. When I get past that, it asks for a username/password again. Supply it with the username/password again, and Windows claims it can't map the drive because the share is in use already with a different username. If you go to Command Prompt and do a net use, there's no listing for the share that I am trying to map.
The Frontview website is kind of annoying too. Options seem much to limited, even for "Advanced" view. It'd be nice if there was a way to move files around and view more of the file structure through the application, instead of trying to map folders as admin. The sliding menu thing often stops responding, making navigating around the menus annoying and cumbersome.
All in all, I'm really frustrated with the ReadyNAS. Again, don't know if it's a Windows thing or a ReadyNAS thing, but it was infinitely smoother trying to set up stuff on my old file server. - You might wish to have a read of http://sphardy.com/web/permissionsguide
- Also, don't forget that in addition to the forum, you have 90 days of free telephone support from Netgear technical support. Probably more helpful with hardware than with setting up permissions though.
- Read the permissions guide, and it seems to be pretty much what I understood it to mean. Going to have to read the advanced version when I get a few more minutes.
New complaint though - I'm out at a library testing the ReadyNAS Remote software. Followed the guide, installed everything per the screenshots. At the library now, and choose "Log in." The popup appears saying that I am connected to my ReadyNAS, but the IP address it displays is neither my home IP address, the library's IP address, or, AFAIK, Netgear's IP address. Did an ARIN Whois on it, and the IP address looks like it belongs to the RIPE network allocation folks.
When I right click again and choose "Connect to ReadyNAS," it brings up Windows Explorer, and the folder C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts\ReadyNAS Shares. There's nothing in the folder. If I look in "Computer," there is a folder called "ReadyNAS Shares," but again, there's nothing in it.
Gotta say, all of this is really, really frustrating. Not quite as seamless as all of the advertising made it out to be.
Only good news so far - put in a third hard drive, and it seems to be accepting that pretty smoothly. But without being able to access my data while on the road, it's kind of worthless.
Edited to add: Already reading through the Remote support subform. NetGear guys - you really ought to link all of the random .pdf files in the "How to set up Remote" webpage: http://www.readynas.com/?p=1435
FWIW, I have downloaded three different PDF files, gone through all the steps, and still nothing. - the wierd looking ip is part of the vpn that the readynas remote uses.
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