NASLite Network Attached Storage

As promised, the latest release of NASLite+ is now available for download. This is primarily a service release, designed to resolve the SMART and e2fsck issues.

SMART status can now be turned off. That will eliminate the alarms generated by older drives. As a side effect, since the drives will not be accessed every 5 minutes by the status report generator, the BIOS can be set to spin drives down after a period of inactivity. That may not work on all machines due to power management incompatibilities, however, on most it should be fine. This has not been extensively tested, but in theory, it should work well.

It was also necessary to implement the ability to force a manual check in the rare event that the automatic repair at boot time fails. There have been a small number of reports that describe filesystem problems after a power failure. This facility should now allow for proper normalization.

In addition, this release includes a number of cosmetic and functional changes to the Administration Utility as well as code optimization of auto configuration, status report generator and system management code.

In general, this release is by all means the best NASLite+ v1.x release to date. It is stable, capable and extremely compact considering the capabilities that it packs.

Thanks to everyone for your support and enjoy NASLite+ v1.2

Well done guys looking forward to using the upgraded version, is version 1.2 now available as the standard NASlite+ download? Or have you hidden it on the site somewhere!! Also do registered users get a discount or free upgrade Well you gotta ask

NASLite+ v1.2 is now the default NASLite+ download, so use your original download link.

Justa few quick questions. I purchased NASLite+ July 30, 2005. When I telnet in it says version 1.2. Is the v1.2 you just anounced different or do I have the latest version?
You mention you can use the BIOS to spins disks down. I though the BIOS was not used or bypassed with NASLite+

thanks for the update tony

thou i feel the need to throw in a minor criticism

it would have been much easer if you could have telneted into the box to set the license key
as i, like most will do, simply burnt the new image, shut down the box replaced the cd and re-started, not expecting it to make that lovely alarm tone and freeze. and without a keyboard or monitor connected or telnet ability, knowing what is going on is difficult

Aside from logistic reasons, you are correct, provided the license key was the only difference. However, that's not the case. In v1.2, the configuration data format is different, so this is the only safe way to prevent NASLite+ from acting as if everyting was OK while misconfigured.

You may also notice that once the configuration data is correct, you can change the license key via Telnet.

If I dowload the new version, then burn it to a CD can I just swap out the CD? Or do I have to reconfigure and save to floppy again? And how safe is the data on my hard drives if I do reconfigure? I'd like to keep up to date with NASlite but its not as simple as just running an update *.exe

Many people, myself included, run NASLite+ as an appliance without a monitor and keyboard. Often the server is in an inconvenient to disrupt location, so how does the new v1.2 get deployed without moving half the office around?

The solution is simple. This is what I do:

I boot the new NASLite+ v1.2 CD-ROM on a desktop (my laptop actually). I login and configure all pertinent options. After that I insert the configuration floppy and save the new configuration. After I shut NASLite down, I take the new CD-ROM and configuration floppy and replace the old ones in my server. Reboot and you should be back in business.

The point is that the actual configuration does not have to occur on the target machine. Remember that the disk utilities are disabled until NASLite+ is properly configured, so initial configuration can be done on any machine that has a bootable CD-ROM drive as well as a floppy drive.

Hope that helps.

The NASLite+ v1.2 release dated 07/2005 is functionally the same as the 08/2005 release. Once the ISO was made available for download the latter part of July, we found a small typo in the auto configuration code that may fail to initialize some of the services given certain conditions. We chose not to announce until it’s fixed, hence the 08/2005 release.

If you have the 07/2005 release and wish to download the 08/2005 release, please do so, however, unless you are experiencing problems, it’s really not necessary.

One other point: I had problems creating the 1.722 MB floppy disk used to store the configuration. I could not do it at all on my Win2000 PC, and of course I wasn't able to use a "normal" 1.44 MB floppy formatted on my Windows PC as the configuration floppy for NASLite+.

I had to boot up Linux using an old Knoppix Live CD I had and then, using the commands shown on the NASLite page for creating a NASLite floppy, manually enter the command in Knoppix to create a 1.722 MB formatted floppy. Also, I couldn't use a "normal-sized" 1.44 MB floppy disk. I had to use an older floppy I had that said "2.0 MB" on it.

Is this the case, in general? That you need to create the floppy using Linux? Or was that a problem unique to me?

1.72M floppy is not required for NASLite+ configuration. Please do not mistake NASLite+ configuration requirements with the space necessary to fit NASLite-SMB/FTP/NFS on a floppy.

With NASLite+, you can have a 360K 5-1/4” drive set as drive A: (/dev/hd0), and it will work fine…

I forgot to clearify this for jmiliz:

It is true that the NASLite kernel does not query the BIOS for proper drive geometry, however it does use hardware that is controlled by the BIOS. You can disable IDE1 in the BIOS. That will prevent NASLite from seeing drives connected to IDE1.

NASLite is capable of probing the available hardware. If the BIOS makes it available, then NASLite will be able to probe it, identify it and load the appropriate driver, provided the hardware is supported.

Hope that helps

Oh, I had big problems when I tried to use a regular Windows FAT-formatted 1.44 MB floppy disk to store the NASLite+ configuration. The server would boot up, but despite having entered the correct registration number (as well as having configured the rest of the settings and saving the configuration to the floppy) it showed the application as being "Unregistered" and most of the functionality was disabled. Then, when it came time to log in to the Admin utility, I couldn't. No matter which userid/password combo I tried, neither the default "admin/nas" nor the new password I had configured seemed to work. It kept saying incorrect password and asking for the userid and password...in an endless loop.

The only thing that finally worked for me was when I created the 1.722 MB floppy using Knoppix, re-entered the registration number, re-configured the server, and saved the configuration to the 1.722 MB floppy. Only then was full functionality enabled allowing me to login to the Admin utility and setup the hard drive.

Any idea what might have caused the problems described above if it had nothing to do with the floppy disk?

I just tried my download link from when I bought NASLite+, and it said that my link was expired, and that I was only entitled to updates for the first 180 days after purchase.

Is this true, as I haven't seen it said anyplace else. If not, I'd really like to update my NASLite+ CD-ROM to version 1.2, otherwise I'll just stick with 1.1.