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thatguy435

New Around Here
Hello all,

I have a small network that can vary between 4 and 15 users on any given day, and needs about 1.5-2.5TB of data stored, depending on the progress of a given project at the time, and slowly growing over time. According to most of the NAS reviews, the throughput on most of the prebuilt NAS boxes is not really up to the kind of load that this will get on a heavy use day - I think I am going to end up building a custom one, since it seems to be a heck of a lot cheaper and much more expandable.

Given that, I've got a build planned with a 45W A64 x2, 2gb RAM, 4x 750gb HDDs in RAID5 (to start, and yes I know it's not backup - I'm looking for extremely large contiguous multi-user data). However, many of my users are not tech savvy.

Are there any decent options that have both anonymous access as well as user based on a simple GUI, web based? I have thought about just mapping drives on windows / NFS shares on linux machines, but some of my users on a given day are transient and I'd like a simple way to let them have access without having to babysit their computers.

Thanks!
 
Users aren't going to interact with the NAS or server OS. Their only interaction will be with the share and any authentication that you set up.

Many people like FreeNAS. OpenFiler is another alternative.
 
So the server will be accessed by both Windows clients and Linux clients?

What kind of throughput are you looking for?

Ubuntu Server might work well for you. Here is the article I used to help me setup my server to test. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30573/77/ I found the web interface very easy to use. On top of that it provided easy setup of Samba file sharing. Using Samba you should be able to provide anonymous access and also specific user access.

00Roush
 
I guess I didn't communicate clearly; my users won't need access to setup or anything; I simply want a unified client GUI ala the web access of many of the NAS-boxes that let you browse the files from a browser... except a little more robust.

Something like fileNice, but with user control as well as guest access for the few of my users who need upload access and not just download.

Essentially I want to write a web URL on the whiteboard, tell people to go there, and give a login name / password to the people who need it rather than set up user accounts for samba auth and deal with showing every person how to map the drive on their OS of choice.
 
I guess I didn't communicate clearly; my users won't need access to setup or anything; I simply want a unified client GUI ala the web access of many of the NAS-boxes that let you browse the files from a browser... except a little more robust.
So what feature(s) is missing from those NASes that do support web file browsing? Can't you just set up a password protected account, then apply it to the shared folders that you want to protect and give out that password?
 
Well, what I'm considering is that a DIY is significantly cheaper, and significantly faster under multi-user... and most of the prebuilt interfaces leave quite a bit to be desired from what I have seen.

Obviously, I have been doing some searching around, and I ran into one called AjaXplorer - a quick look shows some real promise. It supports a guest account by default and user accounts with different permissions, including upload. Downside, it seems to be a bit sluggish.

AjaXplorer
 
Why not just use the basic file browsing that Apache provides?
And for your control/setup, just use Webmin.
 
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