Building your own Nas

Test configuration
To test Naslite, I used an old Via Epia M10000 motherboard bought from the Mini-ITX store at www.mini-itx.com.

Epia boards are ideal for Nas projects because they’re small, consume little power and have integrated processors with plenty of muscle.

Naslite 2 will happily operate with 64MB of Ram but will perform better with 256MB, so I fitted a 256MB Crucial Dimm.

For storage, I used an ageing 80GB Seagate IDE hard disk, and I would boot from an old 32MB memory key. These were components from previous Hands on projects.

The USB version of Naslite 2 is initially configured by a small bootable CD image downloaded from the Server Elements website, so you’ll need an optical drive, but this can be removed once the system’s operational.

Installation
Installing Naslite 2 is straightforward and is fully documented in a Pdf manual from the Server Elements website, but here are the basics.

Once you’ve bought a licence, downloaded the ISO image and burnt a CD, you should set your motherboard to boot from it.

With the USB version of Naslite 2, the bootable CD will launch a utility to prepare your USB storage device. Not all USB storage devices are bootable and some motherboards are fussy about what they can boot from.

I tried and failed with various memory keys, along with a USB card reader, but found an old 32MB key that worked fine. Naslite 2 USB also offers the option to configure the USB device as either a bootable super floppy or a fixed disk with a bootable partition; if one doesn’t work with your motherboard, try the other.

The first bootable super floppy option worked fine with my Epia board, although I had to set the Bios boot options to include USB-HDD and USB-Zip along with USB floppy, and disconnect the DVD drive after the key had been configured. Naslite also lets you create a kicker floppy disk to boot from, which then fires up the USB device – handy for motherboards without a USB-boot option.

Once your system is booting from the USB device or the CD, Naslite presents a list of diagnostics, some of which will fail at this point. You should then log in using the default ‘admin’ and ‘nas’ for the username and password respectively.

From the Naslite admin menu, you should change the Network Configuration so the IP address is on the same subnet as the PCs that will access it – so if your PC is on, say, 192.168.0.x, set the Nas to the same first three numbers and choose a number at the end that’s unused on your network. Change the workgroup name to match whatever you’re using on any Windows machines, then enter the licence code, save the configuration and reboot.

Upon rebooting, the Nas will still fail some diagnostics but you should now be able to Telnet into the admin menu using a PC and the IP address you gave it. You can use this to remotely configure the Nas, eliminating the need for a monitor or keyboard on the unit.