Setup and Installation - more

By default, the 2big network NAS arrives with both of the drives concatenated so that you get the maximum amount of storage. Of course, you give up fault tolerance with this configuration, but you can start using the device immediately. SMB, AFP, HTTP, and FTP—all of the available protocols on the 2big—are enabled by default.  

There is a default share set up and configured for public access. Public access means that anyone on the network has full read/write access to the share without any user authentication. You can either change the access rights of default share or create new shares with different access rights. Guest rights (no authentication, read only), as well as both user and group access rights are supported. Unlike some NASes, "public" access worked the way it was supposed to and didn’t pop up a login box when browsed.

According to LaCie, the 2big network device is a fairly barebones NAS by design. It doesn’t have any built-in media servers such as a DLNA-compliant server for music/video/photos or an iTunes server. Nor does it have the features of a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server that would allow it to function as a web server. 

The 2big is intended as a simple networked store and backup device for either a home office, or a very small business office, as it lacks support for active directory, email notification of any kind, or SNMP monitoring. With so many features not included, you’d expect the browser interface to be very simple—and you’d be right.

Figure 5: Home Page of the 2big network NAS

The home page provides a summary status of the NAS. In the screenshot above, you can see that SMB, AFP, FTP, HTTP, and Bonjour services are running. The NAS has been configured for RAID 1, but the red dot indicates that it’s running in a degraded mode. Below the RAID status indicator, there’s a listing of both the internal as well as the external volumes. Each volume shows the amount of space in use. There’s also a fan status indicator.

Since it’s such a simple device, there only a few menu options. I’ll comment on each briefly.

Users—This menu allows you to create/delete users, change passwords, enable/disable existing users, assign users to groups, and assign access rights to shares.

Figure 6: Assignment of user rights to shares

Groups—This menu lets you create/delete groups, assign users to groups, and set group access rights to shares.

Shares—This is the menu where you can create or delete network shares. For each share, you can decide which services to enable and whether to grant public or guest privileges. You can also set both user and group access rights (see Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 7: Creating a share named "Public" on the 2big network NAS

Figure 8: Setting user and group access rights for the share "Public"

System—In this menu, you can manage your network settings, view/format disks, view/change RAID status, view system status and logs, and upload firmware updates. The system logs appeared to be Linux console logs and were of limited use, as they didn’t log FTP, SMB, AFP or HTTP connections. They also did not log when drives failed, or when rebuilds started or completed. I’ll cover disk/RAID in more depth uin the next section.

Figure 9: Status screen showing service summary. You see the number of connected users for each service, but no additional user details.

Browse—This menu lets you browse shares through a web browser. With a share selected, you can upload, download, or delete files (depending on your user rights). This browser-based file sharing only works on the default HTTP port 80. You can’t change the default port, nor does the 2big support secure HTTPS browsing. During testing, I was able to upload, download, and delete files using the browser interface.

Figure 10: Browser-based file access

Tags: LaCie, NAS, RAID,

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