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^-- dyn dns is the way to go. You can get free domains to point to your IP addy, and you can use a domain name you registered yourself, which costs a few bucks.

A lot of this is new to me so bear with me if I ask what sounds like dumb questions...

If I were to register a domain name could I then use the NAS to act as my mail server? I'm looking at this as a way to one day escape the clutches of Sympatico, Sure there is Google Mail but I trust them even less than Hotmail (which is what Sympatico uses now)

NefCanuck

yes, you can use it for mail.

BTW.. didn't want to brag, but I just recently updated my NAS to 4x2TB. Time to start moving my BDs over...

Right now I have 2TB in a RAID 1 config. I fill up half of that and and I'll look at dumping another 2 2TB drives into the NAS to go RAID 5 in the sucker

NefCanuck

Beware the possibility that your ISP may "filter" your inbound traffic and prevent connections to port 25 (email) from ever happening. I've had that happen intermittently with Cogeco, because we're not supposed to run "servers" on our home Internet connections. Their basic business plans are astronomically priced, so if I indeed find out that Acanac doesn't filter inbound traffic, I'm converting fairly quickly.

It's the same story for Sympatico as well...

Dyn DNS can get around it by forwarding e-mail to a different port.

there's always a way

(07-27-2011, 09:50 PM)NOS2Go4Me Wrote: [ -> ]Beware the possibility that your ISP may "filter" your inbound traffic and prevent connections to port 25 (email) from ever happening. I've had that happen intermittently with Cogeco, because we're not supposed to run "servers" on our home Internet connections. Their basic business plans are astronomically priced, so if I indeed find out that Acanac doesn't filter inbound traffic, I'm converting fairly quickly.

Is that a paid service, Steve? If not, I'm interested.

Hrm, well I'll have to sit down and actually look at this stuff in detail.

Sympatico these days is doing some weird crap, so if they were monkeying around on port 25 it wouldn't surprise me.

Latest twist with them is that my speed profile has been bumped to 12/1 (without my knowledge or request) and yet I'm still listed as having "unlimited" bandwidth and paying the grandfathered rate of $73 taxes in for the old 5/800 profile

Makes me wonder what they'll do if / when they figure out that this happened (The extra speed is nice on the downloads from sites that have the bandwidth I will admit)

Getting back to the main subject NAS questions -

If I were to add extra drives into the NAS box, what is the NAS box supposed to do when I add them?

Rebuild the array to take advantage of the extra drive space? Give me the options of different RAID configs? (Right now I'm at RAID 1 based on what I read in the docs, with four drives I could go up to RAID 5)

Should I be looking at adding the drives now early on or should I just leave things until space becomes an issue? The only reason I thought that might be an issue is that I don't want to run into an issue of a drive that has different specs than the ones I have not playing nice, though I suppose the NAS box should take care of that sort of thing automagically right?

Right now I have two WD Green 2TB drives in the thing, don't need the fastest things on the planet for file storage and music access since the gigabit port is the limiting factor anyways.

NefCanuck

(07-28-2011, 01:05 AM)NefCanuck Wrote: [ -> ]Hrm, well I'll have to sit down and actually look at this stuff in detail.

Sympatico these days is doing some weird crap, so if they were monkeying around on port 25 it wouldn't surprise me.

Latest twist with them is that my speed profile has been bumped to 12/1 (without my knowledge or request) and yet I'm still listed as having "unlimited" bandwidth and paying the grandfathered rate of $73 taxes in for the old 5/800 profile

Makes me wonder what they'll do if / when they figure out that this happened (The extra speed is nice on the downloads from sites that have the bandwidth I will admit)

To be honest, I think you could probably "downgrade" your service to 12/1, take an 80GB cap and save money...

But depends how much you pirate per month

Quote:Getting back to the main subject NAS questions -

If I were to add extra drives into the NAS box, what is the NAS box supposed to do when I add them?

Rebuild the array to take advantage of the extra drive space? Give me the options of different RAID configs? (Right now I'm at RAID 1 based on what I read in the docs, with four drives I could go up to RAID 5)

That all depends,

Most times you have to init the drives, and then you can add them to the existing raid pool that you have.

You can often change from mirrored to mirrored and striped, but most controllers won't allow you to go between major RAID levels -- ie, you usually can't go from striped to mirrored (and/or striped), or from mirrored (and/or striped) to Parity... etc etc.

Quote:Should I be looking at adding the drives now early on or should I just leave things until space becomes an issue? The only reason I thought that might be an issue is that I don't want to run into an issue of a drive that has different specs than the ones I have not playing nice, though I suppose the NAS box should take care of that sort of thing automagically right?

Right now I have two WD Green 2TB drives in the thing, don't need the fastest things on the planet for file storage and music access since the gigabit port is the limiting factor anyways.

NefCanuck

I would recommend sticking with what you have, and when you upgrade, just add to your existing pool. Going to a RAID 5 or 6 isn't a huge gain over mirrored with only 4 or 5 drives.

By the time you're ready to move on, you can back everything up to a single large drive and then rebuild your array with bigger/better disks.

and that'll be years from now anyways ..

Okay I've really let this linger too long and now I'm in a bit of a time crunch so I don't know if I can solve this in time.

I want to be able to access the NAS drives while I'm away in NYC (I leave Thursday the 15th, hence my timing issue)

I started farting around on the DYN DNS site to try and set up the free re-direct but the IP that it appears to find is for the modem itself (and that IP can change dynamically based on Bell releasing / renewing connections at its whim) so I'm at a loss as to how to get it to point to the NAS drive in my private network within that IP address.

So, in a nutshell, I'm stumped, anyone care to walk me through this? I can get most stuff working, but networking issues always make my head hurt

NefCanuck

(09-13-2011, 07:40 AM)NefCanuck Wrote: [ -> ]Okay I've really let this linger too long and now I'm in a bit of a time crunch so I don't know if I can solve this in time.

I want to be able to access the NAS drives while I'm away in NYC (I leave Thursday the 15th, hence my timing issue)

I started farting around on the DYN DNS site to try and set up the free re-direct but the IP that it appears to find is for the modem itself (and that IP can change dynamically based on Bell releasing / renewing connections at its whim) so I'm at a loss as to how to get it to point to the NAS drive in my private network within that IP address.

So, in a nutshell, I'm stumped, anyone care to walk me through this? I can get most stuff working, but networking issues always make my head hurt

NefCanuck

Most mid to high end Routers have a configuration for a DynDNS, you just enter your login credentials and your dyndns is sync'd with your local WAN IP. I did exactly what your trying to acomplish, It was easy for me because my router had a built-in vpn connectivity. you VPN into your dyndns address, and then your entire local network is available to you including your NAS or NDAS drives. I was using NDAS at the time so the client s/w on my pc found the drive and mounted the volume. The only difference was the speed over the interwebz was kinda slow.

Okay I'm running a d-link DIR-655, I found what you are describing (I'm including a screenshot here)



What do I need to do at this point? Remember, My networking skills are pretty crude here

NefCanuck

Careful Dan that you don't open your whole network to the webz....

if you hit up dyndns.org (or their newer site), you can get a tutorial on setting up dyndns, but make sure your firewall is turned on in your router and nothing is being directed, other then the very specific ports you want to access your NAS with.

I know you gotta hit NYC, but you may want to take your files with you for now until you have time to sit down and set it up right and tight.

Yeah, looking at it, I think I'm better off just grabbing what I need on a USB stick for now and planning better when I get back next week

NefCanuck

Hey Nef,

If you are still monkeying with the Network, NAS, Wifi etc, let me know and I cna try to help where I can.

Currently we have the DS1511+ NAS unit, will be grabbing the 2411 unit later and probably that ds211j done the road. We are using it easily enough at the moment. I wil see what I can figure out with Itunes.

We made a change on the NAS that reduced the speed for transfering but I havent found what it was. Average Transfer speed is about 25MegaBytes/second. if you are connected at 1Gbps (gigabit per second) trying to attain a 100Megabytes per second would be pretty much 80% of the bandwidth.

100MBps is about 800Mbps of a 1000Mbps link. Some say it is near the theoretical Max transfer speed.


Just drop me a line and I will do what I can. @ Work so i cant stay onforums much during the day.

uhm

why didn't you just port forward to whatever it is you need?

I used to have my own server online for a while (and will again soon due to new fancy interwebs). I used no-ip.com and then port forwarded the traffic to my server.

It was really easy too. The router was configured so that the server would always get the same LAN ip and the no-ip.com application automatically kept the IP updated

Thing is, I'm really in over my head with this level of networking stuff and as DP pointed out to me just before I went to NYC if I wasn't careful I could open up my NAS to the masses accidentally.

As to my transfer speed, it's not as fast as they claim, but on a gigabit router its much better than when I was trying to use it via the 100MB ports on my Bell modem.

So, the upshot is I'm still in a "closed system" within my home network and I'd like to be able to access the NAS files outside via the internet if I can do so *safely*

NefCanuck