Walkthrough

The disk administration is done via a Web Console that you access by point your browser to the disk address. These are some of the screens of the Web Console:

This is the main page of the console. Here you can access a wizard for share configuration. In my opinion, the wizard is hardly needed. The process of share creation is very simple in itself...

The Server screen allows you to change the network name of the server, the windows domain, the appletalk zone, the date and ip. It also allows you to upgrade the server software, and to shutdown and restart the server.

The network screen allows you to see the network confguration of the server.

The disk screen shows you the disk usage statistics and allows you to format, defragment and backup your data. You cannot partition the disk...

This is where you set up new shares and set permissions. You can only create shares at the root level. You cannot create a share under "d:\projects\xpto". This means that you can't have a tree structure with diferent permissions.

You can set up local groups in the Groups screen. Unfortunately, you can only add local users to groups, unless you have a domain administration accout on the domain (if you are using a domain, of course). This is actualy not said in the user manual, you have to search the FAQ to learn that you have to log in as a domain admin.

The Status screen allows you to control which services are enabled. You can also see the number of connected users and the system log.

Remote Desktop

You can also access the server via Remote Desktop, but there's really not much point in doing so because you get less functionality that via the Web Console.

This is what you get when you log in via remote desktop.

This is the only screen that is not available via Web Console. You can set up the firewall here.

This is the Diagnostics screen which is basically, the system log. Again, you can only see the headers of the message, you can't really see the log message... strange.

Problems I have found

• Only root shares. You can only create shares at the root directory. In the admin console, shares are the only place you can give permissions. This means that you cannot have a tree structure with different permissions. Actually, I have found a way around this, by not using the console - see the next section.
• Only a domain administrator can add domain users. You need to log in to the console with domain administration privileges to be able to configure domain users. This is very strange since, in a common Windows PC, you can create a shared directory and set permissions to domain users, as a regular user. Again, there is a way around this.
• Useless log. You can only see the headers of the windows messages, not the full message...
• No partitions. You can't partition the disk.
• No quotas. You can't define user quotas.

Bugs

• Can't do software update. Our NAS has software version 5.0.0. Every time I try to update to version 5.0.1 or 5.0.2, I get an ASP error on the console saying the file was not found!
• Sometimes you cannot set permissions using the console. I haven't figured out why this happens, but sometimes I use the console to add a group to a share but when I do update, the permissions don't get updated.
• Sometimes, when assigning permissions, you see ALL users of your network. This happens even if have logged in as the local admin user. Unfortunately, you still can't assign them to the shares...

Bypassing some of the console restrictions

Setting permissions for network users

Some of the shortcomings of the console can be bypassed. If you set up a share, it will be, by default, generally acessible by any user of the network. You can then access in Windows and set the security properties. This includes changing user permissions and defining permissions for network users. You can do this with your regular user account.

Creating shares inside shares

As a result of the previous step, you can also set different permissions for folders inside your share. This way you can have different permissions for different folders inside a single share.

Final Thoughts

I was very much disappointed with the administration software that comes with the disk. It's very basic and buggy. I was hoping for something better from LaCie...