7. NAS Features, Continued

The last setting in this group is for FTP. FTP support is very basic and is enabled by default, again, a poor security choice, especially since only anonymous FTP is supported with both read and write privileges. Fortunately, you can disable FTP access via the FTP Mode control, with the other choices being Login to first partition (default) or Login to first matched shared node, which isn't described in the User Manual and I didn't bother asking ASUS to explain. The last control you get is the Maximum Login User, which sets the FTP user limit to a default of 6.

Setting up shares is relatively easy. You first choose a partition from the drop-down selection box, and then modify the entry that's automatically made in the Path box, adding sub-folders if desired. But I found that after a save and restart, although the nested folders that I defined in the path name had been created, the share name I defined didn't appear when I browsed to the WLHDD.

Figure 15: Access rights
(click image to enlarge)

When you create a share you can enable read-only privileges for all users (Shared checkbox) and also add all-user write privs (Write checkbox). If you want to do anything else, you first select the share in the share list and click the Edit button to bring up the Access Rights screen (Figure 15). As you can see from the screenshot, you can set simple privileges for only six different users (plus the special Guest user) for each share. This probably won't be a problem for most of the WL-HDD's target users, however.

Figure 16: Status & Log
(click image to enlarge)

The last NAS-related screen you'll eventually want to visit is the Status page (Figure 16) in the Status & Log section. This is because it's the only place that you can see how the drive is really partitioned and also where you launch the File System Check utility. The good news is that once you launch it, the utility keeps you informed of what it's doing. But the bad is that you can neither stop it once it starts, nor control which partitions it checks, or how many passes it does for each partition.

Even though the WL-HDD has a built-in real-time clock, you can't schedule a periodic running of the File System Check or putting the drive to sleep and waking it up.

Missing entirely are any backup features, which I think should be included in any NAS device. If ASUS is looking for backup feature ideas, duplicating the Linksys NSLU2's features would be a good start.