This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Peter van Ooijen. Original Post: Maxtor, network storage for the masses Feed Title: Peter's Gekko Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/rss.aspx Feed Description: My weblog cotains tips tricks and opinions on ASP.NET, tablet PC's and tech in general. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Peter van Ooijen Latest Posts From Peter's Gekko

For quite some time I am a very content user of an external Maxtor USB drive. This week it was joined a Maxtor "shared storage drive". With a price of an euro a gigabyte I couldn't leave it on the shelf. The maxtor site, the documentation and the utilities were pretty vague. It's very easy to set up by the average nitwit, but when you're a geek you're on your own.

The drive comes in a case which is somewhat longer than a regular USB drive. It has a 100 Mbs ethernet port and two USB connectors. The ethernet plugs directly in a switch (or accesspoint). Inside is a full windows network client, which will find a dhcp server and publish the drive on your LAN where it will appear if it was a complete PC.

Management is done with a web interface. In name the pages are asp pages; I cannot look inside the box to see if there is a real IIS running. Web -based management includes

• Assign the drive to a workgroup (in the figure it's part of my Gekko workgroup)
• Manage users. The storage can only be accessed by users known to the device. The password of the user cannot be blank. This is the point where the client-utilities fall short; trying to add a user will fail quite often. What you have to do is add all users under their windows username with their windows password. Having done that the user will have access without the need to set up anything on the client.
• Manage shared folders. Every user has his own storage invisible to the others. Besides that you can set up shared folders. The right to see, read or change these folders is set up on a per user base.
• Add a printer. You can attach a printer to the USB port. After plugging in the device displays a network printer. Using it the first time requires installing the (Windows) printer driver.
• Add external storage. You can also add another storage device to an USB port. Like another USB drive or a pen drive. The drive will be visible to all users as a shared folder.

And that's it. Now I have a file and print server in my network and look: no PC...