I have a TS-659 Pro II home and at work. I've used them for SMB (AD authentication) and ISCSI targets. I just moved iSCSI off the one at work now that we have another EQ. It's mainly used as a backup target now and for any kind of bulk storage users need. I still use the one at home for my VMWare iSCSI target and file storage. One NIC dedicated to iSCSI traffic and the other to LAN. Also use the built in twonkey media server for streaming movies to google tv devices, etc. The latest firmware totally re-did the dashboard. It's much faster. I would suggest you get a model with an intel CPU, it's a significant speed increase. Even with browsing files. And make sure you pick HD's off their compatibility list.
-----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Ben Scott Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 1:07 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] NAS SMB server (QNAP?) SHORT VERSION Anyone here used the QNAP appliances as an SMB file server ("Windows File Sharing") in an Active Directory environment? How'd it go? (Not as an iSCSI target or other block-level protocol.) LONG VERSION I'm looking for what will basically be a network-attached disk drive. Non-critical file storage for things like ISO images, hard disk images, archives of old user files, installation sources, that sort of thing. SMB will be the protocol. Clients will be Win 7, XP, and that one Win 2000 computer I just can't get rid of. Permissions will be pretty simple, basically a couple of groups, read-only/read-write/none, pull from and authenticate to our Active Directory. No interest in running any applications on the box, nor doing anything more than file copies to/from it. We're not going to be running application off it (unless you count installers). No block level protocols like iSATA, ATA-over-Ethernet, etc. Hardware will be twin mirrored 4TB disks, maybe a third sometimes gets attached to make an offline backup. Rack mount. One option would be a Dell R210-II running CentOS Linux, Linux kernel software RAID, Samba, etc. I've done that before. It works. But management here is concerned that good Linux people are harder to find than Windows people. They don't like that my minions don't have expertise with such systems. So I'm considering something that comes with a bit more hand-holding, a bit more "ready-to-go, out-of-the-box". And NAS hardware can be cheaper than general-purpose server hardware. Specifically, I'm looking at the QNAP TS-412U. Four bays, what looks like a decent web UI, claims to do Active Directory integration. All sorts of flashy bells and whistles we'll never use, but oh well. It's significantly cheaper than most rack-mount general-purpose servers will be. But if their SMB stuff is borken (I presume they're using Samba, but how you configure Samba matters a lot), it's no good to me. Thoughts/suggestions/experiences/etc. welcomed. -- Ben
