In article , Jeff Sutter ruminated:
Does anyone [yet] sell a SnapServer-like kit, where you provide your
own drive(s)?

I'm hoping for a network-attached, not firewire/usb device, in a very
small package, so it can go on the road, that allows drives to appear
as multiple 32g FAT32 partitions, so I can still access them from
Windows 95 systems.

The main problem with a "kit" is getting the OS onto the drive from a
CDROM. SnapServer type kits run a Linux, BSD, or proprietary OS that
is typically loaded off of CDROM onto the hard drive. NAS vendors
handle this problem by attaching a CDROM onto their development
system, install the OS, install their own custom software (usually a
GUI of some sort for setting up the thing), then once everything is as
they want it, using a hard drive duplicator to duplicate the hard
drive to the hard drives that are going to actually be installed in
the customer NAS units. That allows them to not have CDROM drives in the
actual customer units, thus saving them $$$ (the SnapServer market is a
very low-margin market, where every penny counts).

Some more capable systems, like the Cobalt, have a bootstrap built
into their BIOS that will allow reloading the OS and software over a
LAN. But they come with a hard drive installed that has the bootstrap
code already on it. Without a hard drive already installed, what would
be needed would be a flash memory chip with the bootstrap code, which would
add $$ to the product.

Your best bet is to buy one of the very-small-footprint systems,
and install Linux or FreeBSD on it as your "NAS".

--
Eric Lee Green
Linux/Unix Software Engineer seeks employment
see http://badtux.org for resume


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