small business computer hardware advice

[david90]

I'll go against everyone else and recomend a NAS enclosure. I have this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822155009 and love it. After getting off of the firmware that shipped with it (shouldn't be an issue now) I had no stability issues at all.

All you would need to do is pick out hard drives ("Green" drives work great in here) and go. If you won't have that much saved/backed up to it, you can set the drives in RAID1 so it's all mirrored just in case one happens to die on you.

I have that nas and I love it but for business I can't use it because it has a HUGEEE flaw. When you want to share a folder with two users, the NAS will make two different share folders. For example say I want to share folder in the nas called "data" with two users. The nas would create a share folder data for user1 and data-1 for user2. When you browse the network from a windows box, you would see two shares called data and data-1. What was d-link thinking??

Maybe I missed something in the manual but I can't find a way around it. Do you have that same problem???

 

[Celegorm]

I don't have any shared folders on there that I can tell. I just manually went in and made a folder by browsing to the drive \\(Enclosure name)\Volume_1\ then made a new folder and manually mapped the one folder to all my computers and it works great.

 

[root]

yes the current NAS solutions suck. Why would a small business need a DNS server?

I'm not sure about putting everything into one computer (firewall, file server, dns etc) because what if that computer fails? I'm currently looking for a standalone firewall hardware that is right in terms of functionality and price for a small business.

You see that's what I meant about the NAS sharing and directory permissions, they are a right bugger to set up.

Plus almost invariably the device will be using an FAT32 formatted disk, so you have none of the encryption or security features of other better formatting, (e.g NTFS or ext3 etc). as I said, home use, -great, business use, use a computer, since you can configure this the most.

as for a DNS server, I meant for internal DNS, why would you need an internal DNS server? well I guess that depends on whether you want to address your NAS/file server as \\10.0.0.1\ or as \\NAS\