ReadyNAS NV+

My current storage configuration consists of a big hard drive in my main windows desktop and a couple hard drives in my Linux server as backup hard drives. I use rsync to make sure everything important lives on at least two hard drives. Fairly time consuming to step but pretty effective.

Unfortunately I just ran out of space on my desktop and I'm running out on the server. So instead of buying more or bigger hard drives (the Linux server is already full so I'd need a new controller card anyway) I decided to suck it up and get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I ended up choosing the ReadyNAS NV+. I also bought 3 500 GB Hard Drives to start, which delivers ~ 1 TB of space using X-RAID (basically expandable Raid 5).

The initial setup and boot up was easy. There are removable trays for the hard drives so you just put in 4 screws for each hard drive and you are done. No wires or anything to connect. I then just plugged it in to my network and power (with UPS of course) and it 'just works'.

It has a nice web based interface to perform all the managment tasks and it is fairly easy to use. So far I've setup a few shares and copied files over using CIFS (Samba), Rsync, and FTP.

Unfortunately I ran into a problem with it crashing when I did my initial copies. A little debugging and some posts in their forums revealed that it was my old school NetGear RT-314 that was the problem. Since its firmware hadn't been upgraded since 2001, and I bought it several years before that I wasn't too upset. A quick $30 switch (NetGear FS108) fixed the problem and I've copied over 200+ GB already with a lot more to go.

This device also runs several servers (iTunes, SlimServer, UPnP AV, and Media Server) that I'll dig into later but so far I'm pretty happy.

My goal is to turn off my Linux server. The only real service I use on it that I can't repalce at this point is the DNS server and SSH shell. However, the next update for the ReadyNAS NV+ firmware should enable SSH access and hopefully I'll be able to add DNS as well.

Does anyone know of a Gateway/Router that provides local DNS service?