Thankfully I bought my ReadyNAS NV while Infrant was still in charge. Now that Netgear owns them they raised prices on everything without actually improving any of the technology. I paid $550 2 years ago and got upgraded to an NV+ about a month ago when my NV started having problems. They cost twice as much now ???
It generally works very well as long as you're using supported hard drives. I serve media to 2 Xbox media centers, 2 computers and one network DVD player (Avel Linkplayer2) I have run in to similar issues with the name resolution, so I only use IP addresses when mapping drives and shares. I have no MAC experience so I can't be much help there. I also have a DLink DSM-G600 but although it works well as a standard NAS, the media server is not recognized by my network DVD player. The XBMCs can use it fine by just mapping the shares. I believe the DSM-G600 only supports a 500GB drive though, although some users have higher capacity drives running fine. lopaka Brian Weeden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I've posted here before about this problem and really haven't solved anything yet. For those that haven't heard my ranting before, the issue with the Windows on a peer-to-peer network and browsing. If you have a server that is actually managing a domain, that server will maintain a list of which computer name is associated with which IP address on the network. So if I tell my machine to connect to "media" the domain server says "oh that's actually 192.169.0.4" or whatever. If there isn't a domain controller (ie the network is just peers) one machine will maintain the browser list of all the mappings. If something happens, the computer will force an election and the new machine will be the browser. Sounds great in theory but my experience it has been absolutely horrible. Over the last few years I have had off and on problems, ranging from simple annoyances like not being able to see any machines listed under "My Network Places" to massive network slowdowns and inability to transfer even 20MB files due to browser elections dropping connections. I have tried many solutions with the current being to change the registry in all my machines save one to never maintain the browser list and disabling the browser service as well. The one machine which is my media server has that same registry key set to "always" and has the service running. But recently I've found another issue - my wife's MacBook has started to participate in this whole mess. A couple of days ago I was going through the event viewer trying to figure out why the network had gone to hell and saw an entry saying that the MacBook had denied access to an IP and forced an election. Getting the MacBook to stop doing that is beyond my limited OSX knowledge. So, now I'm looking for solutions. I need to rebuild my HTPC / media server and wanted to see if I could find a solution in that. I really want to (try) and cut down on the power used so I was thinking of replacing the whole thing with a NAS box and a small set top like an Apple TV or D-Link box. I was doing some research and noticed that all these NAS solutions support different filesharing protocols, like CIFS, SMB, AFP, NFS, etc. What's the different between these and the normal protocols that are used when you share a drive within Windows? Do they result in more efficient use of the network bandwidth? Why are the ReadyNAS boxes so darn expensive (almost $1000 on Newegg for diskless NV+)? What are other good options? I need something that will support at least 3 TB of storage (ie 4x 1TB SATA drives) in RAID 5 and preferably something can I can daisy chain another to to hit my goal of 6 TB (ie 4x8 1TB SATA in RAID 5). Aside from setting up a domain controller, can anyone think of other ways to help with my problem of the master browser issue and overall poor network performance? Would running a Windows Home Server box help at all? Or would a *nix server be better? I have some experience with *nix (specifically Ubuntu)? ----- Brian Weeden Technical Consultant Secure World Foundation
