After 18 months of abuse, my NAS200 finally lost a hard drive. I heard a muffled beep this evening while working on a new design for this website. Thinking it was one of my daughter’s many noisy toys, I dismissed the alarm and continued working. About an hour ago I attempted to save my work to a share on the NAS200, but was greeted with this rather ambiguous error message.

I could ping the device, but browsing to its administrative website resulted in a 404 error.

The NAS200’s power and Disk 2 lights were blinking in alternation. The Disk 1 indicator was not lit at all. My heart sank at this point. So I next did what all IT professionals do when disaster strikes. I hit the power button and said a small prayer. Unfortunately, my NAS200 would not shut down. I yanked its power cord from the wall, let it cool down, and plugged it back in. As the NAS200 powered up, its fan whirred and lights began blinking.

After reboot, the NAS200’s lights blinked in the same pattern as before, but this time I decided to wait a few minutes rather than have a panic attack. During this time the ACT light flickered rapidly for about 10 minutes. When it finally went out, the power and Disk 2 lights stayed lit, but Disk 1 remained dark. At this point I was able to browse to the administrative website and view Disk 1’s status. The drive appeared to be “removed”. Huh?

I’m perplexed as to what this means. I did not receive a hardware failure e-mail and the “removed” status makes me think that the controller has failed rather than the disk itself. Hmmm… Disk 2 is still accessible so my plan is to back it up as quickly as possible and then proceed as if I’m dealing with a disk failure. Wish me luck.

*Update: The second part of this article can be found here.

I’d recently been struggling with a .NET application that sends email via SMTP through Exchange 2007 outside of my domain at work. That is, until I found a workaround that uses the Exchange 2007 Pickup folder. This eliminated my authentication hassles and resolved the dreaded Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Unable to relay error. I’ve posted the solution here, but I also suggest reading the original post.

SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient("EXCHANGESRV", 25) {
    DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory,
    PickupDirectoryLocation = "\\EXCHANGESRV\PickupFolder"
}

Keep in mind that you’ll either need sufficient write permission on the Pickup folder or be able to impersonate somebody that does. I happen to have written about identity impersonation a few months ago. You’re in luck.

Kudos to stackoverflow.com. I only wish I had enough rep to upvote the submitter. :(

Nearly a month ago I wrote about my problems connecting to the network shares of my Linksys NAS200 using Nautilus in Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. My fix was simple and it worked. Unfortunately, the solution’s WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) was low. Apparently she didn’t think it was easy enough to execute smbmount from a Terminal window. Whatever :) I have since written a small shell script that is called from Session Startup.

Initially, the script failed to connect to my network shares because my wireless network connection hadn’t finished negotiating before the script was executed. I coded around this by creating a while loop that greps the output of a ping to my router. If successful, the mount_shares function is called. Otherwise. the thread will sleep for 10 seconds and try again.

#!/bin/bash

user="thorbardin/ryan%password"
root_dir="/home/ryan/Network Shares"

mount_shares() {
  public_dir="$root_dir"/"Public on Thorbardin"
  home_dir="$root_dir"/"Home on Thorbardin"

  [ -d "$public_dir" ] || mkdir -p "$public_dir"
  [ -d "$home_dir" ] || mkdir -p "$home_dir"

  smbmount "//192.168.1.105/public disk" "$public_dir" -o user="$user"
  smbmount "//192.168.1.105/ryan" "$home_dir" -o user="$user"
}

while [ 1 ]; do
  if ping -c2 192.168.1.1 2>&1 | grep ttl; then
    mount_shares

    exit 0   
  fi
  sleep 10
done

exit 0

I’m already thinking about rewriting this script so that it scans my network using smbtree and automatically mounts all available network shares. That’ll be Part 3!