Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

One of the nice things aobut linux is that it can go into anything and the results are pretty amazing.

One day not too long ago, my wife’s computer died. The only thing she was using it for was as a windows share so that she could access her files from anywhere in the house, and had a common place to store things. And of course, she came to her local IT department for help.

I had been putting it off, but we came across the HD NetCenter at Fry’s. I didn’t know what exactly it could do, but it was cheap so I picked one up. We brought it home and broke open the packaging. And as I was poking around the WD site looking for a firmware upgrade, I found that the netcenter ran linux. “Cool,” I thought to myself.

And I noticed that it had two USB ports on the back, and paid no attention to them until I saw that you can add an external USB 2.0 drive and share that. “Wow!” I thought. “This thing is really nice.”

And finally, it turns out you can share a USB printer on the back as well. So I hooked up my HP 990 inkjet to the back of the NetCenter, and sure enough I had network enabled the printer in no time at all. So now I was completely happy with my decision, and in many ways I thought it was a bargain, because it had this nice web setup screen.
In one of the screens, there were some unadvertised features, like NFS, for instance. In a lot of the forums there were people trying to mount the NFS partitions, and failing, instead mounting the CIFS share instead.

Well, never happy with the status quo, I knew it was possible to get a list of exports on the server. So, showmount -e gave me a list of mount points. I mounted it, and voila. It worked.

So now I have a networked 250 gig hard drive with room to grow in the future, and it’s running linux.