Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Linksys just doesn't give a shit. At all. I specifically bought one of their top end routers to use it as a NAS with USB storage, only to discover that their best of the best router serves files over.....Samba 1.0. Even though Samba 2.0 has been available for over a decade and Samba 3.0 is common place now. Which means that Windows 10 doesn't allow you to actually browse it by default anymore, since it's a huge security risk. And even when you manually install SMB 1.0 suppport, it's still not going to work on Windows 10 Pro editions. Which means that the main selling point of the router is now useless for me. Linksys of course remains completely silent, they don't see anything wrong there.

View on HN

Yeah I wouldn't trust Linksys to do even what their core competency is ... securely. Let alone any NAS.

Sadly the only good home NAS solutions are build it your own (time, hassle) or pay for something more expensive from Synology.

I've been using Fedora Server for this, for several years. There is no GUI front end for configuring Samba, so it does take a bit of time and hassle to learn enough about Samba to edit the sample smb.conf.example the package comes with.

This suggests a GUI is coming, not sure how it will be supported. I'd hope they'd make it possible to wrap that up as a Cockpit plugin. Cockpit is very cool, and is standard with Fedora Server.

https://www.samba.org/samba/GUI/ https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/3534

That is appalling, all of those are EOL, including Samba 3.x.

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_Release_Planning

You bought a router to use as a NAS? I think that's your problem right there.

How is this even voted to the top?

Edit: Looks like I hit a nerve. God forbid anyone buy hardware for a purpose it was actually designed for.

Because your comment is not contributing.

Linksys produces and advertises a "best of the best" router with inbuilt alternative NAS feature that not only is so poorly maintained that it's insecure but also unusable by modern OS.

Some people find that appalling because they want a basic NAS without breaking the bank and more "stuff" lying around, expecting a high end router to cheaply fill that gap.

Some other people will find it appalling because it shows how little Linksys actually cares about the product and security as a whole.

It's actually common nowadays to have NAS-type features in routers now. My non-Linkysys router has SMB/FTP access as part of the stock firmware for USB attached storage.

You may be lucky enough to have avoided learning about the shitshow that is consumer grade "routers". They seem to constantly be trying to come up with stupid shit they can do. Many of the "high end" of the spectrum of garbage have things like OpenVPN servers and samba shares off the included USB port.

They are all hot garbage and should not be used.

I have no problem with a router offering a VPN server; it's another network service after all and I see a router as a device that offers network services. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust the default software stack and wouldn't use it myself personally.

However, a router acting as a file server just sounds plain wrong.

But....why. What is it about it that makes it wrong. These are really powerful devices, sometimes with dual or quad core CPUs and gigabytes of ram, so what's wrong with using them as a NAS? Especially since all I want to do is share a single USB drive on the network so I can watch some films on my TV or just run a backup from my main PC to it. Using my router as a NAS allows me to do that with very little space taken, and most importantly it's completely quiet. Dedicated NAS devices not only use considerably more power(and it does actually add up) but they are almost inevitably louder, with at least one fan and 3.5" disks.

You've already experienced it yourself. Once you find yourself in a situation that needs more than what is offered by the device you find yourself trapped. A dedicated NAS device, even a really basic one, wouldn't have the issues you have.

Also, there are small, quiet[er] NAS devices around. A bit of searching found me this: https://nascompares.com/top-5-silent-and-low-noise-nas-of-th...

>>. A dedicated NAS device, even a really basic one, wouldn't have the issues you have.

How so? What's stopping a NAS maker providing shitty support and/or firmware? I actually used to own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and I got rid of it mostly because of how loud it was and Netgear stopped releasing updates, which meant that things like Timemachine backup stopped working. And it was super slow for transfer speeds compared to what the drives could do.

For comparison sake, that Linksys router I have is super duper quick - it can actually do 100MB/s reads and writes on the connected drives which is very impressive(I thought) - this Samba issue is the only thing separating it from being great at it. And then I could install OpenWRT and then just install the newest version of Samba - it's just that I'm a bit lazy to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com