I am a geek. As such, I have a tendency to over-engineer solutions, especially when it comes to solving personal challenges. And while I may be able to make my ‘solutions’ work, my family sometimes finds them difficult/frustrating/impossible to live with. This is the story of how I made data sharing work in my home.
The Problem
I have a corporate laptop. I also have a home desktop system. I need to be able to easily move files between them – mostly personal documents and media. Some of the files are rather large. Thumb drives are inconvenient. And since I have a home network, using anything other than the network to move these files just feels wrong.
I also need to share things with my family. My wife has a home desktop system and a laptop as well. The kids each have a desktop system (hand-me-downs). And when someone creates a document they want the others to have access to, we need a way to do it easily.
Then there are the friends and family that come by. Many use the WiFi network. Then we want to share pictures (without cutting them down to nibs or posting them to a public area like Facebook). And again, we want it to be easy.
Of course, I also have tax records and other documents that, while I would like to store them centrally for easy access, I have a real need to secure. Sorry, I don’t trust the WiFi security for much.
After trying and failing with a Windows security solution (more below), I decided it was time for a simple NAS solution. After all, I helped roll out one of the first NFS networks for CAD design while I worked at Lockeed, so I was not shy about the technology. And EMC had recently purchased Iomega, which had just released a new low-end NAS device. So I went online and bought a 2 TB ix2.
The Results
I have to say that the Iomega team got the idea of simple down well for this little unit. The ix2 connected to the network with DHCP and was ready to go in minutes. The GUI allowed me to quickly set the configuration items I wanted (mirror the 1 TB SATA drives for data protection, lock the box down to a hard IP address so that it would always be easy to find, etc.). Within 10 minutes I was sharing data on my network.
Now that I had a shared repository for data, I could place things like the software distributions in a central place, and easily be able to reload them on systems that were wiped or replaced. We can easily share data, like robot and project information for our FIRST LEGO League team, between systems. And friends and family that come to visit can push pictures and more to and from the shared space simply and easily.
Then we had our first Mac come to visit. I was not sure exactly how well this was going to work. The answer turned out to be better than expected. The Mac was able to quickly find and attach to the ix2. And it could access all of the same files that the PCs were sharing. Then we created a directory from the Mac with some new files. The PCs could not read the directory. The default permissions on the Mac had the file system locked down. So we went to the Mac and opened up the permissions, and bingo the PCs were able to work with the files from the Mac. Really easy sharing, and nicely secure.
Finally, I was ready to place my financial data onto the device. So I created a new share that was password protected. The security worked great – I had easy access, and everyone else was unable to open the share at all. The only challenge was the Windows mount code – it seems that I have to mount the secure share before mounting the others. Windows will not mount multiple devices from the same server with different authentication credentials, so the secure device has to be mounted first. Figuring that out from the Microsoft error message was a challenge!
We have all of our digital photos shared on the ix2. And a copy of the music repository for iTunes. I noticed that TiVo can see the ix2 as a media source, and it has offered to play music straight from the device. More useful sharing. For now, I am using iTunes, but that sharing may come in handy later.
Additional Information
My first solution was to use the Microsoft tools at hand. So I put Windows 2003 Server in a VM on ESX 3.5 and created a real home Windows security domain. I wound up making it the DHCP server (taking over from the WiFi box) to make the hierarchy work right. Then I upgraded to XP Pro on the desktops to get the domain logins – which meant converting the file permissions and settings for everyone on their systems. In the end, the security was overly restrictive and the systems were all more difficult to use. I had a home rebellion. These are great tools for the enterprise, but they did not work for my home environment.
At one point I had my own small CLARiiON CX3-20 in the basement, complete with Brocade switches and a pair of old 1 Gb FC HBAs for my server. The power draw was significant, and the HVAC was working overtime. Since I was not trying to run an OLTP system from home, I passed the solution to someone else for their lab and went back to the drawing board.
As for the purchase of the ix2, there is an EMC Employee discount. After everything it said and done, that is about $5 cheaper than the online deals you can get on the box. I would be glad to have it even if I were not working for EMC, or if EMC did not own them. This is a solid, simple solution to a real problem I had.
Once I installed the ix2 and decided that I liked it, I added an Gb switch to the home network. It just connects the ix2 and a few high-use devices (my desktop Dell and my Mac Mini, primarily). The fact that the ix2 and most of the new systems all come with 1 Gb Ethernet, and the new switches being under $100, it seemed too cheap to pass up.
Conclusion
Data sharing has become a part of life in this digital era. Having an easy way to share data at home between devices and platform types without a lot of effort makes the digital life a bit easier to enjoy.
