it may have took more than 6 months but I am finally going to finish documenting my build of the homemade NAS Box. The project so far has turned out well. Right now I have it providing four main functions: Time Machine and Windows 7 backup, Bittorrent server, UPnP media server, and proxy server. In future posts I will provide more details.
OS Configuration
I decided to keep the partition layout in OS X simple. The OS would live on the 320GB hard drive. The 2TB drives would not have any special RAID configuration. Just one partition on each drive. Ideally I would have used 3x 2TB hard drives and configured them into a hardware RAID 5 configuration. That would have gave me 4TB of total storage with redundancy in the event one of the hard drives failed. Sadly the FirmTek SATA controller didn’t support any kind of hardware RAID and OS X didn’t support software RAID 5.
Backup Server
Creating a backup server was the easiest part to setup. On the server all I had to do was open up the Sharing System Preferences and enable AFP/SMB file sharing. Now the drives were available to other systems in my network. To get my Mac and Windows systems to use the network storage for backup required configuration on their end.
OS X:
Open up a terminal window and enter the following command.
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Using network shares other than an Apple Time Capsule is completely unsupported by Apple. Users previously reported issues when a drive filled up, which caused their entire Time Machine backup to become corrupt. I’m uncertain if the the issues were ever resolved in 10.6 but to test I followed the advice of some and added a disk quota for the backup’s sparse bundle. Right now I’ve yet to hit the limit so I don’t know what to expect when I do.
Windows 7:
Windows Vista/7 came with a built in backup utility that allowed for the use of network shares as a storage location. That is great if it wasn’t for the fact Vista/7 also broke authentication when connecting to Windows shares hosted on OS X 10.5. The problem was remedied by making an edit to the system with “gpedit.msc”. Information was found at the following link: http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-7/unable-to-access-network-share-on-macos-x-from-windows-7/. With the authentication issues sorted out it was possible to configure Windows 7 to perform a full backup of the system drive on a regular basis.
Next Post: Media Sharing