SmallNetBuilder

Features, Settings

The Giga will try to lease its IP address info from a DHCP server, but it will fall back to using 192.168.11.150 if it is unsuccessful. The only admin security feature you have is password protection since you can't change the port that the HTTP interface responds to from its default of 80. You also can't enable secure HTTP (HTTPS) for the admin interface or restrict HTTP access to specific IP addresses or ranges.

Buffalo has improved the look of its user interfaces, but vestiges of its older, less sophisticated interfaces still can be seen from time to time. I also thought the speed of the admin pages was a little slow, with a consistent 1 second-or so lag after each click.

There isn't an admin login idle timeout, so the lack of a logout button is ok. The Giga also allows multiple users to log in simultaneously and doesn't throw any warnings. Once you're in the Home page (Figure 1) provides quick access to most admin pages.

Figure 1: Home page
(click image to enlarge)

Default share settings are friendly to both Windows and Mac OS users with two default folders, share and share-mac, the latter visible only to Mac OS users.

Additional shares can be added and made available as Windows-only, MacOS-only or both. Share controls are shown in Figure 2 and 3 and include the ability to set User (Win and MacOS) and Group level (Win only) permissions. Read or Read / Write permission can be controlled at the share level only - not to Users or Groups. I also found that the Read / Writable setting appears only when you edit a share, but not while it's being created. Note that you can't set quotas on shares, users or groups.

The Giga's share permission scheme doesn't allow nested shares and therefore you won't get into the permissions problems that nested folders can create. You can, of course, create nested folders in the shares themselves - you just can't set permissions on them.