Are you looking for low cost and lightweight network storage for your office? NASLite offers a solution. It lets you create a NAS box out of your old hardware. You can even use a 486 machine, 16 MB RAM, floppy drive, one to four IDE hard drives and a network card for it. A floppy-based Linux OS called NASLite, can convert any PC into a dedicated file server. It's available in various flavors, which let you to create a dedicated SMB server, NFS server, HTTP server or FTP Server. Here, we'll show how you can create a NAS with SMB shares.
We've given a zipped floppy image of NASLite v1.x on this month's PCQEssential CD. Connect all the IDE drives on the machine, which you want to transform in to NAS box, and then connect it to your hub or switch. To create the NASLite-SMB floppy use a Linux machine and open a command terminal. Copy the NASLite floppy image on to the hard disk. For this, issue the following commands.
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# cd /media/recorder
# cp /linux/ NASLite-SMB.img.gz /root
# cd /root
# gunzip NASLite-SMB.img.gz
Insert a floppy disk and issue the following commands to create the NASLite-SMB floppy.
# fdformat /dev/fd0u1722
# dd if=NASLite.img of=/dev/fd0u1722
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If you don't have Linux handy then you can use a simple shareware utility, WinImage, available at WinImage.com, to copy the image to the floppy disk. To configure it boot the NAS box with the floppy. At the login prompt, give the username as 'admin' and password as 'nas'. From the Options menu, select the fourth option to configure the disks for NAS and then select the 'Primary Master' drive. Read the warning and press 'Y' to continue. Follow this process for all the connected drives. Now, select the first option and give the IP address (mentioned in the box) to the NAS box. Then select the second and third options to change the name and workgroup respectively. Press '9' to save the configuration and reboot the NASLite-SMB box. To access this network storage, go to any Windows machine and click on Start>Run. Type in the IP address of the NASLite-SMB file server. Windows Explorer will show you 'Network Storage' with pre-created network share (Disk1, Disk2, Disk3 and Disk4). On the security front-remember you cannot create any users or assign quotas. Anyone on the network can access this storage. It shows server configuration and disk utilization on a Web browser when you type the IP address of the NASLite box. So, if you want a data dumpyard on a network then go for
NASLite-SMB.
Sanjay Majumder