Thecus N5200 NAS arrived... but need some help...

C

Cyrilix

2[H]4U
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Jan 21, 2005
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My Thecus N5200 just came, so I put in the hard drives, plugged in the power, and turned it on, but I'm unsure how to get it working on my PC. I don't have a router at the moment. All I have is a PC with dual gigabit ethernet and the N5200 has 4 LAN ports + 1 WAN port. One of my PC's gigE is attached to the broadband modem whereas the other is unused, so I'm using that one to plug in to any of the 5 ports on the N5200, but it always shows up as limited connectivity (basically, not working). I was wondering if anyone knew how to set this up, or if I really needed a gigE switch in order to connect the two.

Edit: It seems like I *might* need a crossover cable...
 
I believe you need to make sure your IP and that of the NAS are on the same subnet. (I.E. Bolth are 192.168.0.xxx)

Can your NAS also act as a DNS server? If so, maybe you can plug the internet cable into the NAS and connect your computer as a DNS client.
 
I tried that, but it wouldn't work (although I didn't configure anything). I plugged the internet into WAN, and linked the NAS and my PC via LAN... although I'm not sure if you need a crossover cable for this, because Windows kept on saying "low connectivity" and it wasn't able to ping the NAS from command prompt.
 
Most modern network hardware (at least all the stuff I have used) will autonegotiate, and therefore a crossover cable is not nessecary.

Do you have a static IP from your ISP? If so, you will have to remove the IP from the network configuration on your PC when connecting to the switch with DNS.
 
No, I use DHCP for connecting to the net. That said, the NAS has a static IP -- it sets itself to 192.168.1.100... but maybe I can set it so that the NAS gives a dynamic IP.
 
Hmm, reading the description of the N5200, it looks like it is just a switch, and not a router. If this is the case, you need to set up your computer to connect to the Internet as well as the NAS. I believe windows has some sort of Internet connection sharing feature that you can use when you have two or more network ports. I have never used this, so probably can't be too much help, but I would recommend looking into this to see if it is what you want.

Alternatively, routers are pretty cheap and would make this process alot easier. ;)
 
You might be able to install a DHCP program on your box and have it act as the router. So nic 1 connects to ISP, nic 2 to your NAS over DHCP running on your box.

You can use winproxy to use 2 nics and dhcp. I haven't used it in almost 6 years but it worked back in 2000.

winproxy.com
 
Cyrilix said:
No, I use DHCP for connecting to the net. That said, the NAS has a static IP -- it sets itself to 192.168.1.100... but maybe I can set it so that the NAS gives a dynamic IP.
Click to expand...

If you NAS has the IP address 192.168.1.100, why not assign a static IP from the same subnet to you computer's adapter to which it is connected? That way you ought to be able to access its management interface.
 
I went to pick up my Linksys WRT54GL router from home and first tried setting up the connection using the Linksys as a 100mb switch. That worked, and I was able to change some settings in the Thecus N5200 to make it act as a DHCP server through the use of one of its 4 LAN ports (I have the N5200BR model but I'm not sure if the N5200B model would allow that). It seems like my nForce 4 gigE controller has auto-mdix, allowing me to not require the use of a crossover cable, which is a good thing.

Everything is up and running just fine -- thanks for all the support and ideas provided here. :)

Testing the read speeds, I was able to get 9 MB/s (average) through 10/100 and when I switched to the LAN configuration, I managed to get 27-28 MB/s (average), which is not all that speedy, but should be fine after the initial copy. I have it set up in RAID 5 with 512 KB stripe sizes. I was thinking of doing either 256, 512, or 1 MB. I've heard 1 MB recommendations, but I've also heard recommendations for lower stripe size, so I took the middle ground. :p

Question: I'm not sure if this will happen, but since I'm connected using both my NICs, will the OS have trouble selecting the right connection to use for my internet (the one that's not connected to my NAS)? How does it decide?
 
Cyrilix said:
Testing the read speeds, I was able to get 9 MB/s (average) through 10/100 and when I switched to the LAN configuration, I managed to get 27-28 MB/s (average), which is not all that speedy, but should be fine after the initial copy.
Click to expand...
That's pretty much normal raid 5 speeds at this level.
Cyrilix said:
I was thinking of doing either 256, 512, or 1 MB. I've heard 1 MB recommendations, but I've also heard recommendations for lower stripe size, so I took the middle ground. :p
Click to expand...
I did some extensive testing a while back and found 16k to be the best size. ymmv.
Cyrilix said:
Question: I'm not sure if this will happen, but since I'm connected using both my NICs, will the OS have trouble selecting the right connection to use for my internet (the one that's not connected to my NAS)? How does it decide?
Click to expand...
Usually this is something you specify in a preferences window in a piece of software designed for this purpose. I would personally use the router you have and connect the WAN to the ISP and then your computer to the lan and the nas to the lan on the router. If you want to in the future you can throw in a 1000 Mbit switch.
 
Cyrilix said:
Question: I'm not sure if this will happen, but since I'm connected using both my NICs, will the OS have trouble selecting the right connection to use for my internet (the one that's not connected to my NAS)? How does it decide?
Click to expand...

Your OS choses the connection based in the IP settings and the destination address. Even after reading your post I am not clear how you network is set up. I am running two networks are home: a 100Mbit one that is NAT-routed to the internet and a 1Gbit local one. The two networks use a different subnet (192.168.8.x and 192.168.3.x) and only the .8.x network has a default gateway entry, which is my router. When I send a packet to a computer in the .3 subnet, the GbE card will send this packet, otherwise it'll go out through the other adapter.
 
NAS (Gateway: 192.168.3.254) <---> PC <---> Internet Modem (Gateway: 192.168.2.1)

That's all there is to it for my configuration. I knew there was some command you could specify to make all the internet traffic come from the internet modem... it had something to do with setting the metrics for the different network cards.
 
if you remove the gateway from the 192.168.3.x network, only local traffic will be routed there.
if you want to have a look at your routing table, type
ROUTE PRINT
in a command prompt.
 
Hmm...well, what I'm doing now is setting my internet connection to a metric of 10, and my NAS connection to a metric of 20. It seems like this will mean that my internet connection gets used first, although when I get home, I will check all my routes with route print.
 
Cyrilix said:
Hmm...well, what I'm doing now is setting my internet connection to a metric of 10, and my NAS connection to a metric of 20. It seems like this will mean that my internet connection gets used first, although when I get home, I will check all my routes with route print.
Click to expand...

Let me see if I cannot find another way to word it:
Your gateway address should be such that the device listening at that IP address is a router. You can either manually configure the .3 adapter to use 192.168.2.1 as a gateway or leave it empty. If the device at 192.168.3.254 is indeed a router with an internet connection, then the metric can be used to have windows prefer one connection over the other.
 
Well, the thing is, both the NAS and my internet modem are routers and capable of acting as DHCP servers.

This is my route print:

Code: 
Active Routes:
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.2.1    192.168.2.12       10
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.3.1   192.168.3.100       20
        127.0.0.0        255.0.0.0        127.0.0.1       127.0.0.1       1
      192.168.2.0    255.255.255.0     192.168.2.12    192.168.2.12       10
     192.168.2.12  255.255.255.255        127.0.0.1       127.0.0.1       10
    192.168.2.255  255.255.255.255     192.168.2.12    192.168.2.12       10
      192.168.3.0    255.255.255.0    192.168.3.100   192.168.3.100       20
    192.168.3.100  255.255.255.255        127.0.0.1       127.0.0.1       20
    192.168.3.255  255.255.255.255    192.168.3.100   192.168.3.100       20
        224.0.0.0        240.0.0.0     192.168.2.12    192.168.2.12       10
        224.0.0.0        240.0.0.0    192.168.3.100   192.168.3.100       20
  255.255.255.255  255.255.255.255     192.168.2.12    192.168.2.12       1
  255.255.255.255  255.255.255.255    192.168.3.100   192.168.3.100       1
Default Gateway:       192.168.2.1
My .2 is the internet connection, my .3 is the NAS (which should be 192.168.3.x), and I currently have set the metrics myself. I'm trying to figure out a way to route internet traffic to my .2 and all NAS traffic to .3.

My guess is that whenever I try to send a packet to my NAS, it will first look at this line:
Code: 
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
      192.168.3.0    255.255.255.0    192.168.3.100   192.168.3.100       20
If I try to send a packet to an external IP x.x.x.x, it will have to decide between these two:
Code: 
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.2.1    192.168.2.12       10
          0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.3.1   192.168.3.100       20
...but it will pick the one with the lowest metric all the time (and in this case, would pick the right one).
 
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