MPC Club Reviews 2010
The shared folders is a bit of a mess and could do with some better design.
It’s not difficult but this is the first window that looks like a VB applications
in progress… A better layout could do wonders here…
We can create new folders, assign users and groups to folders for access,
even guest account can be enabled, but most important for streaming, we
finally get to see “NFS”. What surprises me most here however is that CIFS
(SAMBA) and FTP permissions are intertwined which isn’t always a good
idea…
NFS management is done by adding IP addresses that are allowed
connecting to the MeeBox or by subnets. Unfortunately, no masking is used
for instance, if we want to allow all IP addresses in the range 192.168.1.* we
may have to add each IP separately and that’s quite a bit of work.
Even though subnet’s can be added, we rather had an option to enter an IP
range in addition to a single IP for instance 192.168.1.1 up to 192.168.1.254.
Maybe a little something MeeBox can still look at in upcoming firmware.
Where most NFS servers require explicit permissions, MeeBox includes and
“allow for all” option but we don’t recommend that for security reasons.
RAID
CONFIG
The MeeBox supports RAID. Go figure… Both RAID0 (Stripe) and RAID1
(Mirror) are featured but given only two drives, the likely choice is using
striped mode so the volume of two disks are available and performance wise
you gain speed as well. Not necessarily should MeeBox be limited to these
two and offering JBOD would be great, combining both hard drives into 1
volume… It’s a lot safer for your data…
For those unfamiliar with RAID, let’s explain this briefly. When using STRIPE
mode read and writes action happen on both disks at the same time
(performance gain) however, parts of every file are located on both disks. If
any disk would fail beyond recovery, your data is lost. With JBOD however,
all files are written normally to disk and not spread, if any disk fails, at least
a part of the data is not lost.
