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Sorry to post as AC, but I don't have my password handy.

Buffalo has a line of SOHO routers that run DD-WRT from the factory. I use one and it's solid and reliable.

http://www.buffalotech.com/pro...

If you do start such a company, you'll be competing against Buffalo. They use DD-WRT firmware.
http://www.buffalotech.com/pro...

I use a Cirago NUS1000. Simple, tiny, but does run warm. Bonus: it's a print server.

I have to reboot it 5-6 times a year. That's the extent of my "maintenance". But it's not in a crawspace.

You may also consider that many consumer network backup drives can act as media severs such as the Buffalo LinkStation 220

Or, you could use a Router / company that supports DD-WRT out of the box....

Bought mine online, love it, no issues, great reception, and perhaps $10 more than the N600 at the local Be$t Buy.

Check the Buffalo units. they are awesome. http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage. Many of their products allow for access from about every system out there, SMB, FTP, etc.

You could also be running into port blocking issues at the ISP. That is where my suggestion of buying your friend a new router with VPN support. At that point you setup a VPN from your workstation to the NAS via the new router and you can have full access to the disk across the wire.

Its tricky, but in theory it should work.

1) If you're having your backups that close why not just put another drive in your computer and sync to that?
2) Buffalo NAS
3) Apple Airport Time Capsule
4) If you want a cheap hackable solution: Raspberry Pi NAS
5) Any other NAS

Probably the challenging bit is how you will sync to the storage. Here are some options for that:
1) Rsync
2) "Owncloud
3) Unison

You'll probably need to wrap a bit of scripting around it.

The Synology boxes tend to be more expensive than most folks are willing to spend. I've had good results with a Buffalo LinkStation Duo, which was a lot cheaper than the Synology. Buy the one with no hard drives in it, and put your own drives in it for even cheaper (if you happen to have the drive lying around).

Other than that, though, I totally agree with you. Get a consumer NAS device rather than trying to roll your own. It'll use less electricity, and for somebody who admits openly that he's not comfortable with the techie side of things, it'll be a lot less headache.

Whatever you do... Dont get the buffalo WZR-HP-AG300h I have an older WHR-HP54S which ball all accounts is the best router they ever made. I can say that the AG300h is very flaky and technical support will pretty much tell you that they "wait" for updates and have no resolution to the problems people report except to send another router. http://forums.buffalotech.com/t5/Wireless/WZR-HP-AG300H-Pro-firmware-still-in-alpha/td-p/79827

The buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH meets all of these requirements and ships with DD-WRT. However, as the last, very recent thread mentioned DD-WRT is not well maintained anymore. Your best bets are either TomatoUSB or straightforward OpenWRT. I prefer openwrt because it allows simple configuration of hardware taged vlans.

There's what's legal, and what's likely to be prosecuted. If you install optware bind on your dd-wrt Buffalo router it's not like men in black will bust down your door. Laws like this are directed at commercial providers and they provide compliance for 98% of the populace.

Commercial providers have their revenue stream to protect, so they comply with laws like this with minimal oversight. What you do in your living room is pretty much up to you. (with a few exceptions)

The second part (keeping people off your home network) CAN be done by some consumer grade routers that support a Guest Network. My Netgear 37AV has that ability. You set up a second SSID that is open. It can get to the WAN port, but can't see anything on the LAN or the private SSID.

I've got to say that I'm pretty fond of Buffalo's WZR-HP-G300NH routers. They come with your choice of "Professional" or "User-Friendly" firmware choices, with the Professional version as default {DD-WRT}. Guest networks are available with both firmware sets. They're good for isolating point-of-sale networks for PCI compliance, too, with QoS features that you mentioned earlier.

http://buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wireless-n-routers-access-points/airstation-nfiniti-wireless-n-high-power-router-access-point-wzr-hp-g300nh/

Buffalo Technology http://www.buffalotech.com/ is my starting point for all my future networking needs. I don't need anything more than a windows compatable 802.11g router for the foreseeable future, so I have no experience with linux compatability or open source availability.

I bought a WHR-HP-G54 a few years back and am thrilled with it. I think I've only needed to reboot it twice since I bought it and neither time was the routers fault. Possibly the simplest to get working, user friendliest, least problematic piece of tech I've ever owned.

I'm working on getting a Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo set up with Debian Lenny. It's mostly complete, I'm rebuilding the kernel as I type to get USB printer support working. It's very compact and low-power, and has mirrored 500 GB disks, which I think is essential for any home server.

The downside is that I had to solder on a serial connection in order to get access to uboot (a bootloader similar in concept to GRUB) so I could view early kernel output and diagnose problems, log in if networking didn't come up, etc. If you can find a NAS device which supports a serial console (or at least can use netcat instead), that would be good.

One thing to be aware of is that you get a lot less CPU power with these low-watt ARM CPUs. The Linkstation Duo is great for fileserving, printing, and light email and webserving duties, but when I installed Gallery and postgres to view my photos over the web, it ran extremely slowly. That's not too surprising given it's a NAS not a full-fledged server, but it's something to keep in mind. You may only need a low-power device for 90% of your apps, but that last 10% can use a surprising amount of CPU.

Actually the injunction preventing Buffalo from selling wireless routers was lifted last month, so they should be available again soon...

http://www.buffalotech.com/press/releases/buffalos-wireless-injunction-stayed/

And the slashdot article from September: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/07/1937230

I'm going this way.

Not sure of your time frame, but just in case you still have it, maybe their website is better now:

http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/

If it's a discontinued model:

http://site2.buffalotech.com/support/downloads2.php

I assume that you're referring to XP SP2 - my buddies and I had a lot of various USB problems prior to that. Sorry if that's obvious beyond all recognition, just covering bases.

Not sure of your time frame, but just in case you still have it, maybe their website is better now:

http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/

If it's a discontinued model:

http://site2.buffalotech.com/support/downloads2.php

I assume that you're referring to XP SP2 - my buddies and I had a lot of various USB problems prior to that. Sorry if that's obvious beyond all recognition, just covering bases.

I second this. I have a Buffalo Terastation that I got for less than $500 at Fry's. Works great.

So I built a debian box (after looking at FreeNAS and OpenFiler and concluding that they were inadequate for the hardware I had already bought ...).

I used: SilverStone GD01 case (it has room for 7 HDs and big, quiet fans), an Asus AM2 board with 6 SATAII connectors and 2 x gigabit ethernet, I installed a low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 and 2GB RAM as well as 6 Seagate SATA disks with 250GB each. I partitioned the disks to contain a small (2G) partition for RAID-1 and swap (2 x RAID-1 for the root/boot fs - Linux can't boot from software RAID 5 yet, 4 x swap partitions) and the rest of the disk is used for a 5+1 disk RAID-5 setup.

Performance is very good, I can saturate at least the gigabit ethernet LAN connection of my desktop PC both at reading and writing (it chokes at 44MB/s - local speeds are much higher, mail me if you want a benchmark run) and I can also run various server stuff on the box that a normal NAS wouldn't support. The box is extremely quiet, so I'm very pleased.

The DriveStation Quattro is in your price range and provides you with 750GB of storage using RAID 5 and it's in your price range.

I just got a 2TB buffalo terastation pro II for 1K and it's awesome. Here's a review of the 1TB model. They offer other options, but this seemed like the best one for me based on price, capacity, and reputation. True reliability means you probably want RAID 5 and that means 3 or more drives. If you don't want to fight with raid cards and configuring it from scratch, then this is a great option.

The DriveStation Quattro is in your price range and provides you with 750GB of storage using RAID 5 and it's in your price range.

I just got a 2TB buffalo terastation pro II for 1K and it's awesome. Here's a review of the 1TB model. They offer other options, but this seemed like the best one for me based on price, capacity, and reputation. True reliability means you probably want RAID 5 and that means 3 or more drives. If you don't want to fight with raid cards and configuring it from scratch, then this is a great option.

I probably would do this a lot more if it were as easy as ripping a CD

if I were a kleptomaniac I could keep copies

Renting also means that I don't have to allocate space in my house for storing

Unfortunately the new dd-wrt model routers, to be produced, won't be officially on-sale in the US anytime soon. Ironically, amongst the "friends of the defendent" briefs of this Linux-friendly router are Microsoft, but then again, the entire industry has rallied behind them; precisely because what Wi-LAN is doing after they won with Cisco is a possibility should this suit succeed against Buffalo, for the same reasons. When will there be patent reform?!

Buffalo WHR-54GS + DD-WRT= W00T

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wirel ess-g-125-high-speed/wireless-g-125-high-speed-bro adband-router-and-access-point-with-high-gain-ante nna/

You can overclock it and you can set the output power. It's about half the cost of the L suffix linksys. Easy setup, etc.

I'm still learning it's capabilities.

I wonder if they both get worse?

I bought a Linksys wireless router. My wired Dlink had died (surprise there right?) so I wanted to use it as a wired for now but have wireless capability for later. It was the wrt54g. It was not the L suffix one but I wasn't concerned with that as I really did not intend to flash it with Linux or use it as anything other than a router.

During configuration the internal webserver would crash before I could complete the configuation. This was intolerable. I read up on it and found it has substantially dumbed down hardware when compared with the original wrt54g which is now the wrt54gl with the L suffix standing for Linux.

If the blasted thing would have worked I'd have used it but not only was the ram and flash reduced it did not have the features I expected it to have. I did manage to configure it but it took 10 times longer due to not wanting to crash the webserver by stressing it too much.

So I took it back and took the refund and bought a Buffalo router http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wirel ess-g-125-high-speed/wireless-g-125-high-speed-bro adband-router-and-access-point-with-high-gain-ante nna/, ignored the included firmware lest I wretch and flashed it with DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/ and I am very happy. It has more capabilities than I need. Using the web interface is effortless and I had my system up and running in a few minutes after some confusion on my part on how flash it.

I could have ordered the L suffixed version of the Linksys router but it's only available online, it's much more expensive than the Buffalo OR the current stupefied Linksys version and I no longer trusted Linksys.

one RG6 to each room from the central closet.

A couple years ago I would have agreed with this, but....

A central media server is awesome (that's what I have). Having video/music on demand to any room is really unexplainably nice. I use chip'd Xboxes as front-ends.

These days I'd just run 1-2 CAT 6 cables in conduit to each room. RG6 is a single tasker. It's for people who haven't bought into set top boxes. Having recently found the Buffalo LinkTheater, I don't think I would bother with coax to anything but my primary TV(s) for the cable box. And I can envision a day when the only thing connected to my cable is my Tivo.

Well, Buffalo Technology offers this media player/DVD player, which has a download utility for Linux, though I have never tested it. Newegg has it for $230. I guess my complaint would be about the lack of support for some formats and the fact that firmware upgrades have gone about dead. It might not be bad if it had an HDMI or DVI output, but the components handle 1080i fairly well.

Just a quick example of a device that should work with Linux.

If all you want is a NAS, why not go with something from Buffalo? I've never used one myself, but it's a simple Linux-based NAS. From what I hear, you can also buy a version of these things that can be heavily modified, including installing debian or gentoo. But if you want something easy, the Buffalo products themselves aren't supposed to require much expertise.

I have been bitten by every single problem mentioned in that article. Bad OEM "revogery disks" and MS licensing restrictions that prevent one from using an alternative install disks are one of the biggest single problems facing those of us that support very small businesses professionally. Say what you want about Dell... at least they include real windows install disks.

However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.

In addition, I question the use of Linux in this situation... perhaps it was his only way out of a bad recommendation to a client, but the problem is that there are *very* few Linux-savv consultants servicing businesses this size. For this reason alone I don't deploy Linux solutions... I can't find subcontractors who can back me up when I'm on vacation or sick, and should I stop working with a client, I don't want to leave them high and dry. Most consultants I know replace Linux servers with windows because they simply can't support it.

Finally, there's a much better way to do what he's trying to do: a NAS appliance. If all you need is some shared storage, printer sharing and the occasional backup, one of the many small business NAS devices out there (Infrant, Snap / Adaptec, Buffalo, etc...) will do so with greater reliability and less complexity than a PC-based server.

-R

Or have the WiFi equipment auto-configure.

There's supposed to be Vista support for WPS, WiFi Protected Setup, an attempt at cross-vendor automatic setup.

There are at least FIVE DVD players capable of playing high definition video from regular red laser DVD*Rs in MPEG-2 (including ATSC/DVB-T), DivX, WMV, and MPEG-4 (some models), in addition to standard DVDs. Street prices range from about $250 to $430:

IOData AVeL LinkPlayer2
Buffalo LinkTheater
JVC SRDVD-100U
DVICO TVIX-HD M-5000
Zensonic Z500

Most have DVI or HDMI, and all have digital audio outputs.

Most interestingly, these players all have networking included (this is why Fry's has theirs in the network section instead of the DVD section), and some include wireless. So you can play your streams directly from your PC (for example, if you have an ATSC/QAM tuner card) without burning anything!

Inexpensive players! Plentiful burners! Cheap media! Networked playback! HD!

Who needs HD-DVD or Blu-ray!?

Xesdeeni

The Buffalo Linktheatre plays HD DivX and WMV at 720p and 1080i. I own one primarily as a network media player, and whilst it does suck at this, it may be worth looking at as a HTPC replacement if you wish to play HD content from sources other than HD-DVD/BluRay

Plenty of places do sell them. I don't know about Wallmart, but they are available. See:
This one for an example. I should know, I've written reviews for a dozen or so of these things...

Err, Buffalo did, and they cost just about the same as D-Link..?

And the CompUSA brand wireless routers also support WDS, and they are $50 (with 1 $30 rebate per household last time I checked)?

Sorry, D-Link is just lazy suck.

Err, Buffalo did, and they cost just about the same as D-Link..?

And the CompUSA brand wireless routers also support WDS, and they are $50 (with 1 $30 rebate per household last time I checked)?

Sorry, D-Link is just lazy suck.

So far the only one I haven't had trouble with is my Buffalo. http://buffalotech.com/

I use a LinkTheater High-Definition Wireless Media Player talking to An open source media server. Running on Linux with a large collection of media ( 8 discs hanging off a 3ware sata hardware raid controller ). Works very well, I like it, the children like it. Wife has been convinced the media player as a fine idea (eventuallly).

Best solution overall I Have see is the Buffalo Terastation.

They arent cheap, but they wont break the bank either.

The only drawback to the standard Terastation is its lack of support for large (>2gb) files. I just noticed they now have a "pro" version, which I have to assume supports large files but have not confirmed this.

I have a client using two standard terastations and they works beautifully.

Check out the Buffalo Terastation. Great for small businesses. I have installed a few for my friends. No longer have to go scouting with them for used Micro$oft servers. http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail .php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Once you understand that RAID is reliability strategy and are prepared to have appropriate backup measures in place, then RAID 5 becomes an attractive option for the home network. I've recently looked at several options.

• LaCie Biggest Disk - Cheap but of questionable reliability. Since RAID systems should be reliable above all else, I would rule this out.
• Buffalo TeraStation: An interesting product but again reviews are pretty mixed.
• FirewireDirect Vanguard V5: Solid offering from a company that focuses primarily on larger scale storage solutions.
• NetApp: A well regarded product primarily aimed at corporate users.

In my case, a three disk RAID 1 solution proved more appropriate than RAID 5. I value high reliability on the home system and wanted to use a rotating third disk as a backup in the event of catastrophic data loss (e.g. house burns to ground). FWIW, I also use a DAT for differentiatial backups. For many users this may be overkill -- sacrificing three disks plus fixed hardware costs to greatly reduce potential data losses -- but for priceless coding projects and digital pictures, this might be good for you as well.

For some users working with video or having large audio collections, much larger disk systems may be desired. First make sure that you have an appropriate mechanism for backing up a terabyte or three. Then, the Vanguard V5 may be an excellent solution if the $2-3k price is acceptible.

We just got a couple Buffalo TeraStation units at work. The software that comes on the CD is a peice of junk, but the unit itself seems good. The major drawback I've heard about it is that it's really slow in RAID5 mode. Not too big a deal for us, as it's a cache sitting in front of tape, so it's still a faster backup medium. It's obviously running Samba in the background, but it doesn't support NFS mounts. I don't know if that's a big deal for you or not.

The other company I've heard about is Infrant. Similar setup to Buffalo, only instead of being mistaken for a Bose subwoofer, it looks like a small radio circa 1920. It claims an impressive set of awards, but I don't know if it's any faster in the RAID5 department than Buffalo.

But, for home backups that are occurring overnight, and if you're not pushing 100+GB at a time, you're probably good with either. They're both, depending on capacity, between $800-$1,500.

Tera Station

Everything you need probably. I saw a 1TB version for $700 at Fry's the other day.

I have been looking for similar reasons at this kind of thing. I think I am going to go for a Linkstation by Buffalo. It is a network attached storage device which has quite a lively hardware hacking community, mainly because it runs linux and is easily reflashable.

I also want to run the slimserver and there are details on how to run it on this hardware here (depending on whether you have the MIPS version or the PPC version). You can upgrade the hard drive (though not officially) or if you want you can also use external USB2 hard drives as it has a couple of USB ports.

If you want the officially hackable version of this box, they sell a thing called the Kuro Box and they actively encourage hacking it.

HTH

BJPirt

While I can't offer any usage information, as we will be purchasing them in a few months, I can say that they are: not yellow, and about $300 cheaper. The TerraStation also comes with a backup utility, which I don't see mentioned in the article text.

Note: I am not affiliated with Buffalo Tech, just someone who has spent way too much time trying to find a NAS terrabyte storage solution.

I saw one of these at a place I worked at:Buffalo systems ... little less flashy on the presentation but nonetheless does its job... also with a 1Tb at $1000, i think it's a better deal

Real Easy, Secure, and safe.. The Buffalo Terrastion, I just got on for this very purpose: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail .php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Buffalo technologies makes some really nice products, including RAID storage devices.

I recently bought a single drive NAS unit with a 300 GB hard drive, use it for backup/storage for both Linux and WinXP (uh oh.) I also has additional tricks like built-in Gigabit ethernet, ftp server, printer server, backup of itself to attached USB 2.0 drive and misc. other tricks. Very nice device.

The main advantage of doing your backups onto a device such as this is the power savings -- this thing uses very little power compared to running an additional PC/server. Doesn't make much noise and generates very little heat. You can get up to 1.5 TB of storage out of one of these for a pretty price.

Check out the handsome little Buffalos at:

http://www.buffalotech.com/

The thing is just a rebranded Buffalo USB Wireless key. If you don't have wireless already there are probably a lot better maybe even cheaper solutions and as I understand it this doesn't give you any extra functionality like compatibility with Nintendo's proprietary wireless protocol.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail .php?productid=81&categoryid=7

I have a question for anyone who has tested this on an HDTV (40" or larger). Is the video even remotely good? I presently have one of these attached to my TV, since it support 1080i it looks rather good most the time, even with videos with lower resolutions and compression it often destroys watching my shows that only air on SDTV.

I have been wanting to upgrade to a new iPod (own a 30GB 3G) because of the click-wheel and for some more size. However, I was interested in the quality of video on HDTV because of the low resolution allowed and the composite and s-video outputs. While it would not get much use on my own HDTV, it would possibly see use on some of my friends TVs and the like.

Btw, anyone who is looking for a media device to stream video, I recommend the Buffalo device I discussed above. The support for 720p and 1080i is very nice (component outputs) and it has proven to even decode surround sound streams in encoded videos. My only complains were lack of WPA support for wireless and no DVI/HDMI output, but hey at least it plays nearly everything I have with some very minor exceptions (trouble with some subtitles in anime, but that is more how my TV displays images a bit below the screen at times to save from burn-in).

You can get 3mail system.

WLE-HG-DYG:$219.99 * 2
WLE-CC5:$54.99 * 2
WLE-LNC:$24.99 * 2
WLA2-G54C:$79.99 *2
Total:$759.92

And, if WebCam, Power, and some options are added, it is perfect!
So,You must buy ;-P