3. Other Features

By default when a disk share is created, it's wide-open as far as user access and read/write permission. This was fine for my closed home network, but for many users a finer granularity for access control is needed. For those users, a user management capability is provided where users can be created, and given limited rights to the available shares (Figure 3).

Figure 3: User Management

You might be wondering what the "Foreign Shares" are that are referred to in Figure 3. It turns out that the SimpleShare has a handy ability that users of Linksys' NSLU2 would love to see. While the SimpleShare uses a modified Reiser filesystem (more on this later) on its internal drive, it can recognize, read and write to external FAT and NTFS (read only) disks connected to its USB ports. These "foreign" disks can't be used for the mirroring and striping features I'll describe shortly. But this ability is certain to come in handy for Windows users with external USB drives.

Another nice feature of the SimpleShare is its ability to act as a network print server. You plug your USB printer into it and all machines on your network can use it for printing as long as they can handle talking to an LPD-based print server. Setting up the print server for the box was straightforward and well documented. The only hiccup I initially encountered was assigning the printer to a "pool". The SimpleShare software logically divides disks into sections it terms "pools". For example, you can create multiple pools on a disk and set them up for different uses and protection levels.

I attached a printer to the USB port, but before it could be used, it had to be manually assigned to a pool using the administration screen. But when I assigned it to a pool using my Mac's Safari browser, it got stuck in a loop. I selected the pool and got a pop-up indicating success. I selected "OK", and then the page reloaded. Next I got a new pop-up telling me that the printer had been removed and I had no choice but to select "OK", which caused the page to be reloaded. Then I got another pop-up, etc. After a couple rounds of this, I was able to hit the browser stop button and exit the printer section. I went back in, reassigned the pool, and then quickly, after the success pop-up, hit the stop button before the printer was deleted again. Once I did this little dance, the printer stayed put.

I was then able to configure the client computers to use the newly-shared printer. Under Windows, configuration was just a matter of navigating to the SimpleShare server in My Network Places, right clicking on the printer and setting it up using the standard Windows wizard. Once the printer was configured, it worked fine. Setting up under Linux and OS X was similar - just a matter of configuring these systems to use a Windows shared printer using their native configuration tools. So with just a little effort, all my systems were printing to a printer attached to the USB port of the SimpleShare.

I was also pleased to find that the SimpleShare supports setting a disk spin-down time so that your drive is not running all of the time. But when I went to set it up I had a couple of minor problems. Trying to enter any spin-down time greater than 21 minutes resulted in the value being automatically changed to 21 minutes - anything less than 21 minutes was accepted. A check of the page's Javascript and the documentation confirmed that this was proper behavior, but I find the 21 minute limit a bit odd.

I also had a similar chase-the-pop-up problem using my Safari browser to set the spin-down time, but confirmed that the problem didn't exist when using Firefox. The last problem was that every time I went into the screen, the Never Timeout button was preselected, and the spin-down time was blank. Once again, the documentation listed this as "correct" behavior and said that the values were saved, just not displayed on reentry. But as with my browser loop problem, I never was sure that I had really set the timeout behavior, so I would like to see this page show the stored value.