Seagate BlackArmor 440 in Active Directory a losing battle?
For one of my employers I’ve been facing a huge storage challenge due to a lack of IT budget and growing profiles, shared folders and email stores. I’ve been on the hunt for an affordable solution and been looking at everything from Email Archiving Servers to SAN and NAS devices. Last week I got approval to order a Seagate BlackArmor 440 which from the spec sheet seemed like a good fit in our environment. The box came shipped with 4x 1TB drives in a Raid 5 array, just needed power and ethernet cables plugged in and I was able to http to the IP address I got off the front LCD. Logged in with default username/password (admin/admin) and was presented with a fairly basic configuration site.
I went straight for the network setup entering my FQDN, netbios name, domain username and password. The NAS successfully joined Active Directory so I created a folder on it called Private with the intention of giving each user a 5 GB slice for storage and .pst files. The folder was created successfully so I created a subfolder with my username then went to assign NTFS permissions, but Guess what? ..Access Denied!
Okay I thought, I’ve never used one of these before, might as well give Seagate Tech Support a call. 1-800-SEAGATE and only about 5 minutes of hold time I had a rep on the phone. He had me look at the Groups link of the Access tab to see if I could add Active Directory users from the web interface. Unfortunately no users were showing up in the list box. He then had me delete the box’s AD entry and unjoin/rejoin the domain. Once again I was able to successfully join the Active Directory domain but unable to get a user list. Seagate could not offer any additional support at that point so I’m left blindly to fiddle with permissions? The data sheet advertizes Active Directory support but I don’t think their techs are trained very well on supporting this functionality.
All in all it seems like a nice unit, very sturdy, easy to manage, nice features such as encryption and media server but without the Active Directory functionality is it useless in this environment…
Oh well!
At this point I think it’s time to give a Western Digital 4TB ShareSpace a shot. Review to come!
I ran into the exact same problem and there is no solution from seagate coming. Once I had my share created I wanted sub folders for each of my sections could have a public and private folder, however with this device it all or none, you can’t give file level permission. I should have set up a regular file server, you go cheap you get cheap.
However, for a home user I think this would be a good solution, for business large or small this is not for you.
Robert thanks for your post, sorry you’ve had the same frustrations.
As a follow up I’ve tested the Western Digital ShareSpace 4 TB ( WDA4NC40000 ) and have gotten it working well. The box came shipped very similar to the Seagate BlackArmor (Raid 5, HTTP/HTTPS access, Linux OS, almost identical web interface) but guess what? The Active Directory integration worked flawlessly out of the box. My only complaint is that it’s tedious to administer for so many users. An example of my setup is:
NAS\User1share$
AD_DOMAIN\User1
AD_DOMAIN\NASAdmin
NAS\User2share$
AD_DOMAIN\User2
AD_DOMAIN\NASAdmin
NAS\User3share$
AD_DOMAIN\User3
AD_DOMAIN\NASAdmin
NAS\User4share$
AD_DOMAIN\User4
AD_DOMAIN\NASAdmin
NAS\User5share$
AD_DOMAIN\User5
AD_DOMAIN\NASAdmin
Each user has their own personal share which a privileged account can also access for administration purposes. Domain login script assigns each user a network drive letter to their personal space. Users can archive emails via PST files to this share and also dump large picture collections, etc. I have yet to setup quotas on the shares but considering restricting each user to 5GB each. I also will be setting up a Backup-to-Disk folder for Symantec Backup Exec to add redundancy to our nightly backup procedure.
Robert have you explored any additional Network Storage solutions? My next step would be to evaluate a QNAP TS series but I think we will do well with this WD for the price.