Gordon Woolf's Blog

I've got a NAS

A little black box from a supermarket is more useful than I expected

I've got a NAS. It wasn't that I went out of my way to get one - in fact, when I mentioned them to the tech at my favourite computer dealer a year or two ago, he could not see the point of having one.

But then I saw one sitting alone on a display unit at an Aldi supermarket and thought somewhat obtusely that if they are now for sale in supermarkets, they must have a use.

Also, it seemed to cost less than the usual price of the hard drive that was inside it. Which helped my decision-making process.

But, I hear you say, "What is a NAS?"

I'll start with a couple of questions: Do you have a home network? And do you sometimes find that the file you want is on the PC that is switched off?

Only late in the process did I discover what NAS stands for, so I'll let you suffer too, and if you already know, perhaps you do not need to read this. A NAS is a little like a server, and that makes one of the points: it is like a server but it is little.

My previously mentioned tech thinks the job can be done by an outdated PC: stick it under a desk, in a corner or even in a cupboard, and leave it "always on" to use that term for what Microsoft and others wanted us all to do with all our PCs until the economy taught us something different.

Old PCs still need hefty transformers and multiple spinning fans, and they will be running a full operating system with all its dangers and its need to update. So, even if it is in a cupboard, you'll either need to plug in a monitor and keyboard sometimes or get complex with remotely accessing it from one of the PCs you usually use.

A NAS, which I'll now admit means Network Accessed Storage, is small, just a hard drive or two, a small board running a cutdown operating system, usually based on Linux, an ethernet socket to connect to your modem/router, a power input, maybe a couple of USB ports and two or three LEDs. I won't go into the specifics of the one I bought at Aldi for $129 (some got them from some stores where sales had been slower, for $99, which is a good price for a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda green drive, especially after the Thailand floods. It also has a single button which can be set up to copy any folder from that drive to a normal external drive plugged into the front USB port. (You can also plug a printer into the rear USB port which will probably turn your printer into a network printer.

The NAS comes with a setup CD, which I used on one of my PCs, but then for the second one I just accessed the IP address stated in the manual via my browser, entered the default user name and password, and it just worked. I did go into the setup utility later to make some small changes, but it basically worked on being plugged in.

You can also set up this NAS to connect directly to the Internet, even to upload and download remotely to services such as YouTube, Flickr, iTunes (download), Torrent etc and to act as an FTP or web server, which helps explain why the manual runs to 100+ pages. I've done none of those things with my NAS. Yet.

However I did decide to see how it linked to a media server I bought back in 2008, again because I thought it might be useful and because it was cheap (from Zazz). That little silver plastic box has just sat around since then, so I was not expecting much when I connected it to a TV input and plugged in an ethernet cable from my modem-router.

(I had an ethernet cable run through the roof from one end of the house to the other when we recently had to call in an electrician and I had already decided that dragging my laptop from home office to lounge when I wanted to watch something from iView was just a bit too fiddly.)

This time, when I clicked on the TV's input button to get the next input, there was the Zensonic logo circling around the screen. One click and there was a choice of music, photos or videos. The device had found the "nas-server" and found the likely files from that.

Sadly a few of the movie files were not in a format it liked, so I downloaded "Any Video Converter" to my PC and batch converted some. The first conversion I tried was to MPEG2, and that worked. I haven't bothered trying others. Most music formats were fine as was JPEG for photos and all I had to do was organise those in folders on the NAS to just click on the media server's remote for a slide show on the TV. Maybe before long I'll be able to follow the manual's instructions to get music with them.

What I have learned is that if you are going to try a wireless link within the house, it has to be 'n' standard and my equipment overall is just not up to that, so a network cable proved best. It is also more secure.

I should say that this is not a detailed guide to how to set up a NAS because they will all be slightly different, but they are becoming more readily available and the price is dropping, even allowing for the current hard drive hiccup.

My adventures do show that even old relatively cheap equipment can give the kind of viewing which ads imply need the latest and greatest in TVs. And you'll also have network access for most of your other files, anywhere in the house, and an easy way to achieve backups that are independent of your individual PCs.

The NAS has filled a gap in my computer and entertainment arsenal and as a side effect neither of my PCs are on as often as they used to be, so I expect power usage to drop slightly. We also watch less live TV.

Keeping in sync

I've just started to experiment with Microsoft's Windows Live Mesh, which is in beta and has already changed names about three times - plus it seems it may even be coming to the Mac. Basically it is a synchronisation program that is very badly explained but which will keep sets of folders in sync between two or more computers and is linked to online storage.

I made an initial mistake of choosing to sync my Documents folders between my desktop and laptop and then wondered what on earth was happening. It seemed to be sending and receiving tens of thousands of files with the numbers it showed going up, and up, and up. And then very slowly down.

It seems what it does it create lots of placeholder files for all the files it is going to move so it knows which is going to go in what direction. All I have tyo do now is keep both computers linked to my network to give it enough hours to complete the task. At least I eventually discovered that I don't need to keep looking at its screen windows; just keep both going in the taskbar. And because it works slowly it does not seem to be having a dramatic effect on any other jobs.

Presumably if I'd just told it to sync a few small folders in my user section it would have been done by now and just watching for changes to move the files in whatever direction was needed, and to have had few enough to keep a copy in the allowed space in the MS cloud.

I'd guess that all the files that  make up what (i.e. profiles etc) you mention would fill well within the cloud limits and the one advantage of Live Mesh over something like Dropbox seems to be that once you make your choices on what to sync it will then do it all for you. You may therefore like to read a blog item at:
http://www.newsome.org/2011/07/dropbox-vs-windows-live-mesh-i-can-answer-that-question/
which gives the other view. The pro view is at:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-i-switched-from-dropbox-to-windows-live-mesh/3512
particularly page 2 of that item.

How easily things can go wrong

(or how a simple OS update lost both sound and email!)

My problems started because I decided to install the Windows 7 service pack and is a typical mess caused by not realising all that was going wrong and getting in an increasing mess as more things went wrong as a result.

Because installing SP1 left me with speakers that were not working I got into a situation where I could not get my email. As ridiculous as that may seem, it was quite logical at the time... Here's the sequence:

1. Install SP1 via Windows Update. All appears to go well.
2. Open a YouTube video and can hear no sound. Check speakers and though Windows tell me they are working and green bars go up and down on the test in Control Panel, no sound comes out. Check that I have not set the speakers to mute.
3. I have a cloned hard disk that I made only the previous weekend so I decide to pull out the faulty drive and slot in the previous, pre-SP1 drive. Before I do that I realize I must copy the important constantly updated files to a USB stick: MozBackup copies the necessary files for Firefox and Thunderbird; I copy the data file for KeePass and the couple of text files I was working on.
4. I boot to my desktop as it was a week ago and all looks good, and I restore the files from the USB stick.
5. Thunderbird tells me it can't connect to my main mail server and as I look down the left-hand panel I realise it has gone back in time; there's mail for a domain I let expire six months ago, and some mail addresses I set up several months ago are not there.
6. I find via Google where Thunderbird keeps its profiles and go into my Acronis backup to copy the files from that backup. But when started Thunderbird shows the same ancient setup.
7. I sleep on the problem and next morning do some more Googling. It seems that Thunderbird profiles can be in two places under Win7 and this has been causing confusion for some users. I'm now among those. The profile in Vista was usually under the User folder tree going into the Local branch. But in Windows 7 it can be found in both the Local branch and the Roaming branch.
8. MozBackup had copied and restored the wrong Profiles folder. So I copied the Acronis backup files for both and at last Thunderbird opened with the right look. But missing the mail I downloaded after doing that backup. Of course immediately I opened Thunderbird it started downloading the overnight mail, quite a lot of it.
9. Fortunately I remembered to add an ".old" to the profiles folder before restoring the right one, and I can remember a couple of the emails lost in the interregnum so there is a good change they are in the ".old" folder somewhere and Thunderbird does store its mail in text files so all is not lost, just well hidden.
10. I still have not reinstalled SP1, so the job which started all this has still not been done. But I have found that there is an updated version of MozBackup. Mine dates to before the latest release version 1.4.10 from December 13, 2009, (which added support for Thunderbird 3) and there is a beta version of 1.5 dated March 7, 2011.

I have also found that MozBackup files are just Zip files, so, if you change the extension to Zip, you can look inside them and be selective. It may seem paranoid but I have also started to back up the mail files (now I know which are the right ones to back up) every four hours.

Lesson learned: no matter how well prepared you think you are, you can still get caught.

Are you giving your password away?

"I wouldn't do that" would probably be your answer to the suggestion that you could be giving your password away.

But think about it. Do you have passwords on scraps of paper? Do you use the same password for many sites on the web where you have to log in?

As someone involved in publishing, have you ever given out your password for someone to upload a file to your website or FTP site? Maybe you can change that afterwards, but does it bear any similarity to the password you use for online banking?

There have been many warnings that you should never believe the phone caller who says they are from your bank or some other payment processing service, but it continues to happen, and last year TechWeb reported how a security firm has used official-looking pollsters in New York's Central Park to ask questions from the mundane -- "Is this your first visit to New York City?" -- to the personal -- "What's your mother's maiden name?"

More than 70 percent of those polled gave up their mother's maiden name -- a potential goldmine, since it's often used to confirm identities or demanded in a password reset -- while over 90 percent handed over their place and date of birth. More than half told the pollsters how they come up with online passwords.

I should add that I have always wondered about why banks use that mother's maiden name question. But then I've lived in small towns where everyone would know the family name of just about everyone else's mother. "George Smith? Oh, yes, he married the girl of Green!"

How many of the readers of this use as all or part of password their place of birth, favorite sports team, pet's name, spouse's petname or name for you. Or used any of those words backwards? How easily would you give that information in an answer to a phone or street poll? Especially if you were promised a gift or discount of some kind.

Whether you do or not, it may be a good time to change your password. Today.

I clone: it's the easy way back after a crash

The ultimate problem on a PC. It just would not boot up. The BIOS was trying to boot from the second hard drive and could not find the first. When I disabled the second hard drive the BIOS could not find a drive at all.

Removing the tray and then the drive from the tray I could feel it spinning but there was no sign of recognition even from my SATA docking station.

This was the disaster I knew would come and fortunately I was prepared.

My hard drives are mounted in removable trays, so I could easily swap from Win 7 to my XP drive, and that booted perfectly, proving, if I still needed proof, that it was a problem with the drive and nothing else.

But I had an easy way back to business. A month ago I had cloned my main drive using software called HDclone from Miray Software in Germany.

All I had to do was replace the faulty drive in the removable tray with the cloned one...that means loosening the tray cover, sliding that off then undoing four screws, replacing the drive, doing up the screws, sliding on and tightening the cover (one screw) and sliding it into the caddy. That takes about three minutes.

Reboot and there is my OS as it was a month ago. Copy back some files from the usual weekly backup via DriveImage (OK that software is ancient and I'll go for TrueImage when the Win7 version of that is out next month, but the old one still works perfectly) and the past day or so's email and Firefox history plus the password safe data from my thumbdrive (thanks to MozBackup).

I've since cloned the drive again and updated the cloned copy of my XP system. That takes time, but not when I have to be present. The PC will chug away for the 5 or 6 hours the cloning process takes.

The Mira website states that the latest version can create cloned drives even from within Windows but I'm currently using a bootable CD made by copying their .iso file to a CD-R. And the paid versions claim to work at twice the speed, and to be able to clone partitions as well as a full drive.

Even so, the company suggests that, to prove that the software will work on your system, you first download the free version and create a cloned drive. The appeal of then being able to do it in half the time will woo most users. The Basic edition as a download costs about US$25 (they price in Euros).

As I said, the software will work within Windows but as a self-booting CD it will copy just about any drive with any OS to any other drive which is at least the same size. And since the downloaded zip file includes an .iso file, Mac and Linux users should be able to create the bootable CD.

I'm not making any special claims for them, more for cloning as an adjunct to other backup systems. There are at least five other ways to clone a drive. See this page at Downloadquad

This was the second cloning application I tried and it did all that I needed, and simply, so I've stuck with it.

Oh yes, unless you want to read the manual, have one of those (usually green) converter plugs ready to put your mouse in via the PS/2 port instead of USB, though Mira may well have solved that with the new version that I'll download shortly.

Next time someone asks if you backup you can then say "I clone".

What happened to the failed drive? It was out of warranty with the dealer I bought it from, well over 12 months, but he suggested I look at the drive maker's website. That was Seagate. They have a page to enter the model and serial numbers and if it is within 5 years of manufacture, they replace it. I got a return number, sent it off and within two weeks a replacement came back. Only cost was one-way freight to get it to their depot.