Setting Up

I'll be using four Seagate ST3500630AS Barracuda 7200.10 SATA Hard Drives, which have an unformatted capacity of 500GB, and a 16MB cache. These drives are on Infrant's ReadyNAS Device Compatibility List (Infrant, in fact recommends Seagate drives in their marketing literature for the ReadyNAS NV+). If you’re going to purchase a ReadyNAS without hard drives and will be providing your own, it’s important to use only the drives that have been certified and approved by Infrant. While non-certified drives may work just fine without incident, they could also turn into a nightmare of sporadic, intermittent problems that can put your data at risk. Infrant also reserves the right to deny technical support to anyone using unsupported drives in their ReadyNAS units. I had the Barracudas installed in the drive trays and back in the ReadyNAS in under 20 minutes.

Before powering on the ReadyNAS, I installed Infrant’s RAIDar utility. RAIDar is the discovery tool for locating ReadyNAS units on your network. You’ll probably have to set your firewall to unblock RAIDar the first time it runs. Launching with a cool little animation of a radar dish as it scans your network, RAIDar displays each ReadyNAS it discovers on your network, in a spreadsheet-like row and column format, with LEDs for system status, volume, drives, temperature, fan, and UPS if you have one plugged in. Placing your mouse pointer over the Vol, Disk, Drives, Tmp, Fan and UPS LEDs, will briefly display a little label with the current status for that item.

RAIDar's Setup button does one of two things depending on the mode your ReadyNAS is in. If you have initiated a Factory Default to reset the ReadyNAS or change the RAID configuration, it will launch a volume and RAID configuration wizard. Otherwise, it will launch the FrontView web manager for the ReadyNAS. The Browse button will open an Explorer window and display any available shares on the ReadyNAS. Rescan scans your network for ReadyNAS units. Locate blinks the hard disk LEDs on the selected ReadyNAS, and is handy if you have more than one installed on your network but you're not sure which one is currently selected under RAIDar. About displays the usual dialog box showing you the version of RAIDar installed. Help launches a short and to-the-point .HTML help file that gives you the rundown on using RAIDar and provides you with a legend to decipher RAIDar's LED codes. And of course, Exit closes the utility.

With the ReadyNAS powered up, RAIDar should detect the unit immediately (if not, just click the Refresh button). The LED Display on the ReadyNAS will appear and begin displaying status messages during boot up. It will install the firmware; create the RAID volume based on your particular model's factory defaults (in this case, a single X-RAID volume), initialize and synchronize the disks. This process can take two hours or more, depending on the capacity of the drives installed. The entire process on the specific model ReadyNAS NV+ here, and the four 500 GB Seagate drives, took 3 hours and 47 minutes to complete.

Once the disk initialization and RAID synchronization is complete, you’ll need to run FrontView to finish setting up the ReadyNAS. Compatible with all the major web browsers, FrontView is Infrant Technologies' web-based management utility. It can be launched from the Setup button in RAIDar, or directly through your default browser by using this address:

https://<ip_address>/admin/

Where <ip_address> = the IP address that was automatically assigned to the ReadyNAS during installation (it’s displayed in RAIDar). You’ll be prompted to accept a certificate, and will have to enter the login and password (the login is admin and the default password is infrant1). FrontView’s interface is clean, intuitive and easy on the eyes with an attractive brushed metal background, muted grays and pale blue gradients. The currently viewed page can be sent to your printer with the Print button, and refreshed with the Refresh button—both located in the upper right corner. When run for the first time, FrontView launches in Setup Wizard mode, which steps the user through a number of tabbed pages to perform the final basic tasks needed to finish the ReadyNAS configuration (setting the date and time, changing the admin password, creating user accounts, shares, etc).

Whether you use the tabs on each configuration page (the current selected tab's label is black, while unselected tabs are blue), or the Back and Next buttons, you lose any changes you make on a page if you do not click the Apply button before proceeding to the next one. Click the button displaying the current date and time on FrontView’s status bar at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll be taken to the System page where you set the time zone, date and time on the ReadyNAS. The Volume, Disk, Fan, Temperature and UPS LEDs found in RAIDar, are duplicated on the right hand side of the status bar, and function the same way. If there’s a problem or something requires your attention, FrontView will pop up an appropriate dialog box to let you know. The Log Out button doesn’t actually log you out of the FrontView session and closes your browser—rather it prompts you to “close all browser windows to securely log out.”

Advanced Control mode adds a set of categorized buttons with slide-out sub-menus to the left hand side of FrontView’s pages that allow access to all of the Setup Wizard commands and options as well as more advanced ones for “Power Users.” However, FrontView has enough clear, precise instruction for every option and operation, that even a newbie computer user would have little or no trouble deciphering and using the more advanced commands (particularly if he or she had the ReadyNAS User Guide beside them as a reference). Another advantage of using Advanced Control Mode to complete the configuration of your ReadyNAS NV+ is that you can make all the necessary final configurations in one shot—rather than having to step through the Setup Wizard and then go back through Advanced Control mode to adjust those additional settings that will allow you to get the most out of your ReadyNAS.

You'll want to set the correct time zone and the current date and time through the appropriate drop-down boxes. Your best bet would be to just simply select the correct time zone and check off the option that synchronizes the clock on the ReadyNAS with NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers over the Internet.

Next, you can enter up to three separate E-Mail addresses that the ReadyNAS can use to E-Mail you alerts on any system events that would indicate a problem with the unit (optional but nice to have). If you've gotten this far, it means that your broadband router or modem is already set up as a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, and has assigned the ReadyNAS an IP address as it has for all the other computers and devices on your network. Unless you prefer or need to assign a static IP address to the ReadyNAS NV+ or change the assigned host name to something a bit more user-friendly (or colorful), you can skip the Network page.

The ReadyNAS NV+ can be connected to a wireless network. The recommended method by Infrant is using a CAT-5 Ethernet cable to connect the ReadyNAS directly to your wireless access point. The other but least-desirable method is to connect a USB wireless adapter directly to one of the USB ports in back of the ReadyNAS. I say least-desirable, because Infrant's warning in the User Guide that support for USB wireless devices is "limited" is an understatement, to put it mildly. There are currently no USB Wireless Adapters on the Infrant Hardware Compatibility List. Although that doesn't necessarily mean that adapter won't work, it also doesn't mean that it will. Once you've got the ReadyNAS connected to your wireless network, an additional Wireless tab will appear on FrontView's Network page where you can set-up your wireless network's name (ESSID), operating mode, data encryption mode, and encryption key, and other settings.

As tempting as it is to leave the default admin password in place, it's generally not a good practice. Changing the admin password on the ReadyNAS requires a password recovery question, answer and E-Mail address. If you ever forget the password, open up your browser and type in the following:

https://<ip_address>/password_recovery/

Where <ip_address> = the IP address of your ReadyNAS. This will bring up a special FrontView Password Recovery page in your default web browser. Answering the question correctly on that page will reset the admin password, which will be sent to the E-Mail address you enter there. Keep in mind that without this fail-safe procedure, if you forget the admin password, the only way to recover it is to perform a Factory Default operation on the ReadyNAS, which will also unceremoniously remove ALL of your data and user accounts from it.

Next, we need to set the Security Mode for the ReadyNAS. The ReadyNAS NV+ supports three modes: Share, User and Domain. Share Mode is the most relaxed setting of the three, allowing you to restrict access with an optional password shared by all of the users you set up on the ReadyNAS.