Verisign Advertising puts Words in your Mouth

11:01.19 - Saturday 14th May 2005   (Link to This Entry)

Received some advertising snail-mail from Verisign this morning, pushing their 'Verisign Test ID' service which is basically a way of securing your server. It's not the paper-based intrusion into my home life that I object to, but the actual content of the ad.

The letter includes a credit-card-sized fold-out booklet that contains three quotes that have apparently gone spectacularly wrong.

"There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home" Ken Olsen, 1977 Founder and President of Digital Equipment

"I predict the Internet will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse" Bob Metcalf, 1995 Inventor of Ethernet in 1973 and founder of 3Com Corp in 1979

"Our Web server and Internet transactions are 100% secure." My Name, 2005 My Company Name

Of all the cheek! As web professionals, we all know that our servers are not 100% secure, but we're not stupid enough to think that Verisign can magically make it hacker-proof either! Way to alienate potential customers, idiots!

Buffalo LinkStation 120GB Network Attached Storage Review

15:52.13 - Saturday 14th May 2005   (Link to This Entry)

120GB Version, £142.84 inc VAT & Shipping from ebuyer.com

My home network comprises a couple of desktops, a laptop and a PocketPC, all connected to a Motorola Surfboard cable modem via a D-Link DI-614+ router. The PPC connects wirelessly, leaving one free RJ45 on the back of the router. For quite some time now, I've been cussing at the lack of low-power, shared storage space. My requirements are nowhere near high enough to warrant a dedicated, always-on server since I continually worry about power drain as well has hardware failure, and so some Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is the order of the day.

Enter the Buffalo LinkStation. As I said, I don't need the proverbial ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE JIGAWATTS?!?!? of storage space, so I opted for the smallest, cheapest unit I could find using my lazy-assed approach. This basically means finding out the names and models of the main players and froogling them. It's a method that has served me well time and time again.

 
The box tells you more about the unit thanthe actual manual. Almost.

The box arrived a whole four days earlier than expected from eBuyer. Contents were pretty much everything you require: the main unit; a flat-ribbon RJ45 cable; a power lead; an installation CD and manual; a stand in case you want to mount it upright and four tiny wee rubber feet if, like some techno-stacking pervert, you want to lay the device flat.

The LinkStation is a light beige (almost white) box measuring 60x173x185mm and weighing 1.3KG - quite a hefty weight for it's diminutive size. On the front are Power, Connection, Disk Full and Diagnostic LEDs, along with a front USB port for attaching printers, memory card readers or other USB harddrives. All of this is set into a mirror-effect strip for a decidedly iPod-like style. On the back is another USB, an RJ45 and power connector and a switch so that you can change the RJ45 from straight to crossover, allowing you to use either kind of cable. The power supply is built into the unit, contributing to the weight.

Installation was pretty straightforward and only two of the options on the CD are required, these being 'Setup LinkStation' and 'Install IP Utility'. The first of these simply wakes the machine up and the second tells you it's IP Address.

 
Hey, good-lookin'! Where have I seen that logo before? Looks kinda familiar...

My network relies on your MAC Address being permitted, however, and so I had to disable this before the unit could be found. Once done, and armed with the IP address it was a simple matter of opening a browser and entering http://[ip of unit] and logging in as root with no password. From here it's a case of hitting 'Maintenance' and viewing the System Status to find the unit's MAC Address, and away we go. Of course, I later realised that the MAC Address is on a sticker on the back of the unit, but my way was more fun.

For a test of the sustained transfer speed I copied a 4.24GB DVD image over from my tower. This took roughly 14 minutes, averaging out at 5MB a second, and therefore using 40mbit of my 100mbit LAN connection. Using FTP over the LAN I got a steady 6MB a second - a slight improvement.

Something that bugs me about the LinkStation is the speed of the web-based interface. Both my router and cable modem use the same approach and they both blow the LinkStation out of the water for speed of response. Click on a link on either of those devices and the page is right there in a split second. The LinkStation's response time seems terribly slow and laggy by comparison. It's a minor quirk since you're unlikely to spend any amount of time in there after getting it set up to your preference, but it's a valid gripe, nonetheless.

 
That all-important RJ45: 10/100 at your service, baby.

Another thing that is incredibly annoying is the way the FTP service is configured. This allows you to route port 21 from the net and allow people to access your LinkStation as an FTP server. The creation of groups, users and shared folders is all done under the Security tab as you would expect, but once you've spent time doing this, you then have to go back to the Network tab to enable those shared folders. This took me a whole ten minutes of swearing to find out, and could do with cleaning up. In addition to this, you absolutely must specify a default gateway under Network Setup if you are behind a router, otherwise simply forwarding port 21 just will not work.

Once installed, however, everything is pretty straightforward and the drive can be accessed like any other. You can map a drive letter to the unit if you want to access it easily through applications, or you can browse to the root folder and drag out shortcuts to the directories in there. Another minor limitation rears it's head here, in that you can't simply right click in the root folder to create another directory - you must create them as shared folders via the web interface. This is finnicky but, once again, you're not going to spend hours in here once it's all set up.

[UPDATE: 03-JUN-2005]
Network printing is a doddle to set up. I had the laser printer set up on the tower and so the driver installation was much simpler - I recommend getting your USB printer working on the machine you want to access it from before unplugging it and sticking the USB cable into the back of the LinkStation. Once you're connected up, go to the Printers folder and add a new printer as usual. Select 'Network Printer' and follow the prompts. If you have editted your hosts file to give the IP of the LinkStation a name (Mine's LS120) this will be much easier.

Print speed doesn't seem to suffer at all in the limited testing I did. I printed out a test page, a web page (where images need to be retrieved) and a bitmap image - none of the test prints caused me to wait longer than I was used to. I'd call this a resounding success, and I'll be installing the printer onto the other desktop once I get a moment.

The backup section needs a valid backup drive to be able to work, and I don't actually have such a thing. It looks like you can set it to back up selected folders on the drive (so you can back up your work, but ignore the FTP side, for example) and set regular automated backups, too. Presumably the unit wants a USB drive plugged into the front USB port, and it's this that I don't currently possess. If I ever get my hands on one, I'll let you know.
[END OF UPDATE]

We bought this so as to be able to access information from any machine on the network, and for that purpose it works admirably. You can, of course, use it as a backup drive or even just for transporting files - though it's a touch on the heavy side for that. The fact that it will act as a low-power, standalone FTP server is an added bonus which I am bound to use somewhere along the line as well.

All in all it's a nice little unit that gives an impression of quality, just so long as you don't peek beneath the hood. Hard copy documentation is minimal and the supplied software and built-in web interface could use some polishing, but they do the job and once it's done, you need never use them again.

Rating: 8/10 - pretty good.
A nice unit with a couple of let-downs.
Questions? Post a message in the forum thread!