Other Setup

When you first log into the 323 you'll notice that the opening screen (Figure 7) has a familiar "D-Link" look and feel. The icons arranged horizontally across the top of the screen are identical to those found on a D-Link router I recently tested. Arranged vertically along the left side of the screen are options for selected menu item in the top row.

Figure 7: Main Screen

The Setup tab lets you run (or re-run) the setup wizard, configure LAN settings and name the device. Most of the configuration will be done under the Advanced or Tools menu selections. The Users and Groups setup screens felt very much like a 1.0 release of a product. Indeed, the unit tested was based on firmware version 1.01. Version 1.0 had some issues related to using the Firefox browser that were addressed in 1.01, so be sure to check the 323's support page for the latest firmware before you start setting up.

Figure 8: Create User screen

When creating a user (Figure 8), I discovered that you first had to create groups, because once you created a user, you couldn't go back and edit group membership. The only edit allowed on a user account is to change its password. Note that users can belong to only one group, but multiple users can belong to the same group. Similarly, the screen for group "management" lets you add or delete groups only.

Network access was also cumbersome to configure. You can configure access for either individuals or for groups. But the manual doesn't tell you that you have to create directories outside the web-based configuration utility before you can assign network access rights. In the example in Figure 9, I tried to assign rights to the group "RO".

Figure 9: Network Access Configuration screen

But when I tried to type into the Folder field, I got an error message saying "A folder must be selected". I hit the browse button, and it brought up a directory tree to select. Unfortunately, when I selected any of the directories, the field adjacent to the "OK" button didn't populate properly. I had to manually type in the volume name and path and hit OK before I could set permissions. Interestingly, you only have two choices for permission: Read only or Read/Write. There isn't a selection for "None".

While you can probably configure the rights you need in a home environment, it would be nice if you had more control over directories, groups and users. A Western Digital NAS I recently tested had a very simple procedure for creating users and setting up rights for them. When you created the user, automatically a "private" space was created for their personal files, and a slick wizard mapped drive letters for both their personal and shared drive spaces.

Tags: BYOD, D-Link, NAS, RAID,

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