Setting Up
Completing the hardware setup was just a matter of plugging in the power and network cables and powering the unit up. When the TS-101 booted, it was silent except for the noise of the drive spinning. Nice. Qnap supports installation from both Windows and Macintosh systems, so I first turned to my MacBook Pro. The instructions documented a couple of ways for an Apple user to initially connect to the device, but I found both methods a bit confusing.
The instructions were trying to get across the point that you needed to bring up your browser and connect to the box on port 6000. The hard part was figuring out the IP address. I just did a broadcast-ping for my network: "ping 192.168.1.255". When I saw an unfamiliar IP address respond, I connected to it on the documented port of 6000 with my browser. Figure 2 shows the initial web page from the device.
Figure 2: TS-101 Main Menu
I'm using a package from Parallels that allows me to run Windows XP simultaneously with Mac OS X, so I later tried out installing the TS-101 from Windows. In this case, Qnap provided a little utility that automatically found the device and walked through the initial setup, making the process a bit easier. Setting the box up with my browser under OS X stepped me through some standard initialization steps. Menus were presented for defining the name of the box, setting the administrator password, setting the network parameters, and so on.
When setting the time on the TS-101, I was pleased to see NTP support, as shown in Figure 3. There was also an option for selecting one of ten different languages for filename encoding.
Contest #29 Results 
