A small guide to NAS - II

 NAS has the advantage of being accessible from any machine on your network, advantage can become a disadvantage. In the professional environment your new intern does not need to access your accounts or even your home, your child may not have needed access to all your data, even if only to prevent an unfortunate loss of data.

That is where the operating system scene of your NAS, usually based on GNU / Linux. In the same way as a conventional Linux or OS X, you can set what is called user rights. Every user - or group of users - can access data from the NAS that will not appear in others. In this way, on the same machine on a network segment can access information.

Before embarking on the configuration of your NAS, think of the rights and permissions you want to assign to each. If you take good habits from the start it will be easy to manage your NAS in the future. However, if a little chaotic you may confront the so-called conflicts of permissions. Overnight, you can no longer be able to edit some files. It will then consider rebuilding your rights from the administration of your SIN or even to intervene on the command line via the terminal for the more adventurous of you. While the NAS is a self-contained, with an OS based GNU / Linux and quite often an advanced RAID and multiple hard drives, but it is not necessarily free of problems. Your device may suffer physical damage in the same way that a computer be stolen or the system may fail and delete data. We do insist that it must save its data ..

All have a NAS backup function integrated exploitable from the USB ports on the device but there are also other solutions. With Folder Watch, for example, you can schedule a backup of your NAS on an external hard drive connected to your Mac.

The services of your NAS

The services of a NAS are all applications that run on your NAS and give you additional features to the simple storage space represented by the unit. Be mentioned of course Time Machine and iTunes server that interest us most when we have equipment operating Apple. The Time Machine is usually transparent, although the move to Leo broke the compatibility of most of the NAS, which had to be updated by their manufacturers.

ITunes servers themselves are more or less successful, and the results are pretty random .... This option is most often simply to share your music over the network through a shared library in iTunes. In case of problems, it is quite hard OTeN the same results from one brand to another and diagnose problems is quite complicated.

This is where the presence of a community around a brand will make a difference. Depending on the brand and the business community behind it you will have access to a number of applications developed by communities of users. Do not forget this setting in your choice. Brands course offer basic services delivered with a device, but users have the most advanced reagents and on the lookout for updates or new features.

iOS and your NAS

As long as your iPhone or iPad to be connected to the network you have access to your NAS theory. Why "theoretically"? Having no Finder, there is immediately more complicated to access your data as if you were on your Mac.

Most directors are accessed via a browser compatible with Mobile Safari, and have a basic file browser. Generally you will be limited quite quickly, especially if you are thinking about streaming is not really optimized in this case.

You can also turn to applications. Most manufacturers offer their own applications to access their proprietary services: Synology is a typical example, but Netgear and Qnap are not far behind. There are also many applications beyond that possible uses: Air Video, for example, can stream video from SIN on their iPhone or iPad, without intermediary. 

The remote access 

The NAS is connected to your network, it is very likely that the latter is also connected to your Internet connection and therefore ... the internet. This gives your staff a cloud that you control 100%.

From home, it offers very good rates, but outside, the speed of your connection will depend on the speed of your ADSL connection, and that of your access point. With fiber optics, flow rates are more important and become more reliable connection. They can, however rarely to stream a movie from an external connection, but are more than sufficient to run a small service on your iPhone calendar sync for example, or an FTP server to retrieve some documents.

The disadvantages

All is not rosy in the world of NAS. These can often suffer delays often inherent to the network or for the cheapest models, their small processors and little RAM.

The NAS is a device that runs 24/24 and is designed as such: the fan is almost never stops, and generates a noise that must be taken into account. Remember also that these devices have an impact on your power factor, even if they are more efficient. This is the price to pay for home and away several terabytes of storage within reach.