Wise on Tech » NAS

Hacking Time Machine

Jon Bates — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:09:14 +0000

This past week I was the unfortunate victim of hard drive failure on my 1stgen Macbook Pro. After looking through my local NAS and finding that my most recent backup was done in April, I kicked myself a little bit. I have everything available to me to do regular backups, but like most people I am just too lazy. I decided that I wanted to try and get Time Machine to perform backups to a network share instead of a local drive. A simple terminal command was all that was needed to make my network volumes show up in Time Machine.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Just changing this preference has worked for many other people, but I get the a message from Time Machine stating "The backup disk image could not be created." Nothing on google or the apple support forums seems to give any good info on the situation.

Any ideas?

Shutdown a LaCie Ethernet Disk mini (NAS) from a command line

Jonathan Wise — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:26:06 +0000

The URL to shutdown the mini NAS, surprisingly, accepts both POST and GET. This is great for me, since I like to shut down my whole home theater at night. The URL looks like:

http://admin:yourpassword@ipaddress/cgi-bin/admin/reboot?action=shutdown

And you can use WGET or CURL on pretty much any platform to call it from a command line.

Drobo Looks Good

Jonathan Wise — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:54:49 +0000

This thing solves all of RAID's problems, while maintain all the redundancy. If it had built-in NAS, instead of the add-on module that works by disabling local access, I'd buy one today. Even with that caveat, Drobo is how external disc storage should work.

Watch the demo to see all its features.