SmallNetBuilder

Setup - more

Sans Digital documents several ways to initialize the unit after it's powered up. You can plug in a keyboard and VGA monitor to do the initial setup via command-line . Or you can run a Windows-only (DOS) utility (Figure 2) to find the unit and configure the IP address.

Figure 2: DOS-Based initialization

If you can determine the initial IP address of the unit via some other method, you can log straight into the web interface to do setup that way. Figure 3 shows an initial Web configuration menu once you connect via a web browser.

Figure 3: Web Maintenance Menu

Web administration is available over both HTTP and secure HTTPS connections. From the "Server Config" set of menus, you can set some standard options such as the admin password, name of the NAS, the time zone, language, etc.

One unique option I noticed in this section was the ability for the Plus to become a NTP server. This means you can configure all of the computers on your LAN to get their time from the Plus, a nice feature.

Feature Tour

The "Network Settings" menu (Figure 4) gets into the details of getting the product configured with services for your network.

Figure 4: Network Settings Menu

This set of menus had me confused due to numerous options that appeared to indicate that the device had multiple Ethernet ports that could be configured and bonded in various ways. That would be nice, except for the fact that there is only one Ethernet port on the MN4L+B.

I also noticed that when I hit the "Help" or the "Tech Support" options on this menu, I was just redirected to the top-level page of Sans Digital's web site, rather than any page or information related to the product.

Checking the specs of the product on the web site showed no option for multiple Ethernet ports. When I consulted the manual that accompanied the box, it didn't help much either stating: "The MN4L+(B) is equipped with 2 Gigabit ports".

A query to Sans Digital revealed the source of the bad information. Sans Digital has a rack-mount product that shares the same basic manual and web interface. These issues (and a number of other similar inaccuracies in the manual) are a holdover from that product. Sans Digital said the errors will be corrected in a later revision of the manual, but gave no timeframe for the revision.

Moving on to networking options that made actually made sense with this product, I found a lot of features. Figure 5 shows setup for Microsoft protocols.

Figure 5: Microsoft Networking Setup

This menu allows you to join a workgroup or work with a Microsoft Domain controller and an Active Directory Service.