I can share a "SHORT VERSION" of experience from the last gig - we used them mostly with MACs for exactly what you're talking about - backups(timemachine), some file storage, shares. Since it was mostly MACs I don't know if that helps you, there were some Windows clients too. In the few months I was working with them we didn't have any issues to speak of, and when I was putting together some Xymon monitoring of them with SNMP, their support was responsive.
The web interface looked pretty straight forward also. Sorry, I know that's not helpful, but I can at least say I didn't have any bad experience with them overall... Don K -------------------------------------------- On Mon, 10/28/13, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: Subject: [NTSysADM] NAS SMB server (QNAP?) To: [email protected] Date: Monday, October 28, 2013, 1:06 PM 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
