Several weeks ago now, I picked up one of the tiny linux-based HP Media Vaults (mv2120). The advantage of this one over those Windows based media jobbies was that it supported NFS to make my Linux universe happy. Or at least supposedly it does. To speed things along, I mounted the device using CIFS. All the files are copied over now, so I can power-down our slowly-getting-flaky-Celeron-300-Mandrake-older-than-time file server. It feels good to have 500 GB laying around waiting for abuse.

Update: I had some CIFS file permissions problems – stuff was getting set non-writable and causing headaches. This fixed it:

use the ‘noperm’ options, thus:
//serverIP/public /media/nas cifs
credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,noperm 0 0Bingo! But what an awful solution, eh?! As it happens, I’m the only
person logging on to this machine, so maybe it doesn’t matter. But how
do folk on shared systems deal with this? (There seem to be a lot of
cheesed off cifs users around, from what I’ve seen!)