5. Advanced Features, Continued

I was initially a little confused about how an encrypted share would work. Would the client have to enter the encryption password, as well as the user password, when mounting the network share? I saw no provision for this, but what I had to do became clear the next time I rebooted the box. When the SimpleShare rebooted, I received an e-mail from it telling me that I had to go into the administration screen and enter the encryption password. Once I did this, the share was available for clients. So this feature is meant to protect your data if someone walks off with your drive - without the password, they won't be able to access it.

It's interesting to note, however, that the entering of the pool password was done over an HTTP connection, not secure HTTPS. This means that you really shouldn't be using this feature to protect your data from local LAN users, because just like the administration password, the encryption password will travel across the LAN in the clear.

An advanced feature that was advertised for the box was Network File System (NFS) support. NFS is the native network file system for Unix-based systems such as Linux. But NFS support is uncommon in consumer-level NAS devices even though many of them run Linux internally. Support for NFS was turned on by default when creating a share, so it should have been trivial to just mount the NFS share from my Linux or my OSX box, but there was one little thing missing. In order to mount an NFS share, you need to know where it is on the server side, and this wasn't documented anywhere.

I tried mounting variations of my pool and share name, but without knowing the internal directory structure of the device, it was a guessing game that I was losing. Time to call in customer support. First I sent an e-mail describing my problem, and a day or so later I got a personal response suggesting that I call the toll-free number. When I called the toll-free number, I was connected without wait and I talked to the same person who had sent the e-mail.

He hadn't been trained on NFS support for the box and didn't have an answer, but he promised to forward my question on to the engineering department. The next day, I received an e-mail describing the directory structure I needed to mount. I'm happy that I was finally able to get the answer I needed, but what should have taken maybe a day ended up taking three! By the way, the SimpleShare currently doesn't even appear in Simple Tech's support site, so you'll need to rely on Simple Tech's support personnel if you run into problems.

For future reference, and since it's not documented, the proper mount command for NFS mounting the share from Linux is:

mount -t nfs :/shares/

For example:

mount -t nfs SimpleShare:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /mnt

From Mac OS X, mounting the NFS share is a little bit trickier. The normal finder method of mounting an NFS share won't work because, by default, OS X uses what NFS considers an "insecure" network port. In order to support this configuration, the NFS server on the SimpleShare would have to be set up to allow this. Without this configuration, you'll have to mount the NFS share from the OS X command line, using similar syntax to Linux, except using the "mount_nfs" command with the "-P" switch.