Thecus N5200: Screaming fast, but plenty rough around the edges

Accounts and System Menus

The Accounts Menu holds options for Authentication method and is where you manage Users and Groups. The Authentication screen controls are shown in Figure 17 and include settings for specifying WINS, Windows Active Directory (ADS) or Windows NT servers to handle user authentication chores. This is also where you set the Windows workgroup name, which I would have preferred to see with the SMB/CIFS controls.

Figure 17: Authentication screen

The Users and Groups menu items bring up very similar screens. Figure 18 shows the screen for modifying the "testgroup" I had set up. The group currently has no members, but I could add the "test" member in the Users List by selecting it and using the left arrow button to move it into the Members List box. Note that user and group permissions are not set here, but by using the ACL button in the Storage > Folder screen.

Figure 18: Group screen

The last menu of interest is System (Language just allows selection of Japanese, two flavors of Chinese, Spanish, French, Korean, German or Italian for the user interface). The Notification screen allows selection of Beep and Email notification of errors, but both didn't do much for me. Disabling Beep Notification doesn't block all beeping and I couldn't get the email notification to work with my email account that required a unencrypted username and password log in for SMTP access. The Email notification feature provides plain, login, and cram-md5 options as well as on and off, but the user manual provides no guidance as to their use and there is no button to send a test email.

I didn't find the Logs feature to be very helpful, either. There are separate Info, Warn and Error logs that can be cleared ("truncated" in 5200 lingo) and downloaded. But the assignment of information to the various logs didn't seem logical. Figure 19 shows that the Info log is where notification of physical removal and replacement of drives gets sent. But messages about RAID recover get sent to the Warning log and the Error log receives notifications of when "degrade" mode kicks in. Unfortunately, I saw no indication of email warning sends (or more importantly send failures) to help me figure out why I didn't receive any email from the 5200.

Figure 19: Logs screen

The System menu selections include Time for manual or NTP-based time setting and Config Mgmt to save and restore system settings. The Factory Default, Firmware Upgrade, Administrator Password, Reboot and Shutdown and Logout selections need no explanation. I couldn't, however, find a way to change the admin idle logout time.