It’s been a while since my last post… I’ve had some more family crises to deal with. My mother, who has been in a nursing home for over a year, has had some setbacks that have put her back into the hospital. It’s been so tough on her since we lost my dad last March. I talk to her doctors nearly every day, and we see some things getting better, but other things not so much. I want to be optimistic, but it’s getting to the point where just communicating with her is becoming problematic. I need to call her lawyer again to make sure everything is in order with her Will and Trust documents. I know… just saying that sounds horrible, but believe me, having these documents nearby will help you through should the unthinkable happen.

My latest tech tinkerings have yielded some new capabilities in the Wilkinson household. I’ve setup a new SimpleShare NAS system from SimpleTech. I had a 160GB NetDisk from Ximeta for a couple years, and although it functioned fine, I found the fact that clients needed special software to access it irksome. Ximeta has actually updated their product line quite a bit since I last browsed their wares, so I might take another look at them in the future. My purchase of the SimpleShare drive was one of impulse, Buy.com had the 160gb unit on sale for $89.95. I was already sitting on an unused 250GB SimpleDrive USB 2.0 drive, and my intention was to attach it to the USB 2.0 port on the SimpleShare NAS drive to increase available capacity.

I found the setup to be extremely easy, although the web interface was clearly optimized for IE as some of the menus and graphics didn’t look good in Firefox 2.0. Once I got the basic setup completed, I went in for some of the more advanced stuff, including setting up “Pooled” storage which made the tethered 250GB USB 2.0 drive plus the native 160GB drive on the SimpleShare appear to the network as one large volume. Pretty cool. The other great thing is that the drive uses SMB protocol so it was easily accessible to all my Windows PCs as well as my wife’s iMac. The one thing I haven’t had time to check out yet was a feature that would allow me to utilize port forwarding to make this drive accessible from the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll bother with that, as I can already access everything with my ImInTouch software from 01 Communique. The primary purpose of this NAS device is to provide a convenient place for backing up data from various computers. So far, it’s exceeding my expectations. Frankly, I’m a NAS fanatic, and have been advocating it to friends and customers a lot lately. The market for NAS for home and small office is just exploding, so you can find something to fit almost any need.

On a completely unrelated note, I finally got my photos from my October trip to Maui posted on line to Picasa. So please check them out!

[tags] Simpletech, simpleshare, maui, nas, ximenta[/tags]