[Discuss] Adventures in N40L Land

[Richard Pieri]

On Feb 13, 2012, at 8:50 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> 
> Looks like a pretty decent system.

I think so.  It's exactly what I was looking for: a shelf-sized box with enough capacity to consolidate two Mac minis and a pile of external disks. Unlike with some of the off-the-shelf NAS solutions, I can easily do things like install the HandBrakeCLI to run video encodes overnight or tune authentication for the local environment or even install the Debathena suite if I feel like it (which I don't :).

I'm not using NFS at all.  I am using a mix of SMB (samba) for the Windows clients and AFP (netatalk) for the Macs.  The latter is necessary for Time Machine which doesn't work over SMB.  It's a one-user environment so I'm not concerned with file ownership on the exported datasets.

For Tom:
http://sidehack.gweep.net/~ratinox/02-13-12_2156.jpg
Sorry for the graininess.  Poor lighting for photography.  The drive cage is easily visible, anyway.  The left-most drive slot had the system disk.  The grate to the left of the cage is the front of the power supply.  Underneath the PSU is space for two half-height PCI cards.  The slot covers are visible in back behind the wiring.  The silvery wire on the left is the SATA run from the main board up to the optical disk drive bay.  You can't see it in this photograph but all of the drive bay power connectors are tucked up above the cage and below the ODD bay.  The grille-looking bit center below the cage is a heat sink.  The two white nubs to the right of the heat sink are the UDIMM clips.

--Rich P.