Bargain NAS for the masses

Yesterday a friend asked me to plug his Western Digital My Book World Editon (network attached HDD) into his work network to provide a central repository for system images and configuration files. As we didn't know the username/password, I followed the password recovery procedure. The unit appeared to reset but I still couldn't log on with the default admin/123456 combination. Speaking to technical support this morning revealed that you have to wait for "up to 12 hours" after "a number of failed log on attempts". Sure enough when I tried again I was able to get on.

I've been looking for some large, cheap and decent network attached storage to provide a central repository in my office. Another friend had a Thecus N2100 which was quite nice but slow and was fussy about the disks if would work with. Phil looked at the Netgear SC101 but didn't go for it due to lack of Vista support.

This particular MBWE provides just short of 1TB of usable storage on a single SATA HDD. Data may be accessed only via CIFS, that's Samba for Unix clients and file-shares for Windows clients. I was a little disappointed to see no NFS, HTTP or FTP support. Moreover, the "Shared Storage Manager" web interface is horribly slow and is dumbed-down far too much for my liking.

That said, the search for the password recovery procedure also turned up some very interesting information. The MBWE is cheap, runs BusyBox Linux and is easily hacked - happy days! PC World had these in stock (here) with a shelf price of £210 but their (shameful) "web exclusive" collect-at-store system meant I was able to pop down and pick one up for £177, that's £151 before VAT for a headless Linux PC with a 1TB disk!

Hacking the box was extremely easy with many well documented experiences on the web. To enable SSHd I followed the instructions found here. This site offers to show you how this works, very smart. I went on to permanently disable the clunky "MioNet" process and install an FTP server. NFS (and TFTP for IP phones etc.) is just a case of configuration. I'll have a look at an HTTPd server when I need something better than the already built-in daemon.