A few weeks ago I began having problems with my Linksys NAS200. At the time, I couldn’t discern whether it was a hard drive failure or a problem with the NAS200’s disk controller. The status message within the NAS200’s administrative panel suggested that the drive had been “removed”. I received no alert message and proceeded to diagnose the problem to the best of my abilities.

After some thought, I devised a plan to back up the remaining good disk, power down the NAS200, and replace Disk 1 with a new hard drive. I purchased an Eagle Consus M-Series external drive enclosure and a spare Western Digital 500 GB hard drive for a total of $102.95. I placed the order last Saturday and UPS delivered the package to my door on the following Tuesday.

Last night I backed up the files on my Linksys NAS200 using the Eagle drive enclosure and a spare 250 GB SATA drive that I had laying around. Transferring the files from my NAS200 to the external drive was painful. At speeds between 900 KB/sec and 1.9 MB/sec, I decided to make a sacrifice and chose not to include my music and movie collection.

Even without my media files the backup still took about nine hours to complete. It’s almost inevitable that my wife is awake at 3 AM. Before bed, I asked her to wake me up so that I could check on the progress of the backup. I didn’t want to risk having the USB drive enclosure overheat and foil my plans. My wife is more cheerful than I am at 3 o’clock in the morning. She woke me up as planned and I stumbled from the bedroom to sit on the floor in front of the NAS200. The backup was complete.

Do not attempt to insert a hard drive into your NAS200 in the dark. Remember the puzzling “ribbon” that I found in each of the drive bays? Well, half of the ribbon is encased in plastic. I didn’t even think about it last night and ended up turning Disk 1’s ribbon into an accordion. In the dark, at 3 AM, I thought the drive was properly seated. I turned on the device and waited. The Disk 2 LED lit up brightly. I waited some more. Disk 1 remained dark. My wife turned on our living room lights and found me squatting on the floor holding the NAS200 inches from my face. Within the glow of the incandescents I could tell what I had just done.

I had to shake the NAS200 (gently) to remove the disk that I had just securely wedged into the first drive bay. Once the drive was removed I decided to try again in the morning. With proper lighting and a few more hours of sleep, I carefully inserted the new drive and pressed the power button. The NAS200 whirred and its lights began blinking. Disk 2… Disk 1… Disk 1! According to what I had previously read, The NAS200’s disk LEDs alternate when mirroring. My NAS200’s lights were doing just that.

After work I noticed that both disk lights were solid indicating that both drives were active. I checked the NAS200’s administrative panel and both drives were listed as “Used by RAID 1”. Satisfied, I mounted the shares and proceeded to browse through my files. Everything was there!

My original NAS200 review has over ninety comments and both the Linksys community forums and linksysinfo.org are filled with posts left by people inquiring about the device. I’ve read a lot of bad reviews and received quite a few disparaging comments regarding the reliability of the NAS200. I bought it knowing it was new on the market. Trusting the Linksys brand name, I figured it’d be a sturdy device and for eighteen months it has been.

It’s just as foolish to rely on a single device as it is a single hard drive for safe file storage. Hardware will always fail. That said, I’ve begun to work on an off-site storage strategy for my home backups. I’ll be posting more on this when I’ve worked out the details.

After 18 months of abuse, my NAS200 finally lost a hard drive. I heard a muffled beep this evening while working on a new design for this website. Thinking it was one of my daughter’s many noisy toys, I dismissed the alarm and continued working. About an hour ago I attempted to save my work to a share on the NAS200, but was greeted with this rather ambiguous error message.

I could ping the device, but browsing to its administrative website resulted in a 404 error.

The NAS200’s power and Disk 2 lights were blinking in alternation. The Disk 1 indicator was not lit at all. My heart sank at this point. So I next did what all IT professionals do when disaster strikes. I hit the power button and said a small prayer. Unfortunately, my NAS200 would not shut down. I yanked its power cord from the wall, let it cool down, and plugged it back in. As the NAS200 powered up, its fan whirred and lights began blinking.

After reboot, the NAS200’s lights blinked in the same pattern as before, but this time I decided to wait a few minutes rather than have a panic attack. During this time the ACT light flickered rapidly for about 10 minutes. When it finally went out, the power and Disk 2 lights stayed lit, but Disk 1 remained dark. At this point I was able to browse to the administrative website and view Disk 1’s status. The drive appeared to be “removed”. Huh?

I’m perplexed as to what this means. I did not receive a hardware failure e-mail and the “removed” status makes me think that the controller has failed rather than the disk itself. Hmmm… Disk 2 is still accessible so my plan is to back it up as quickly as possible and then proceed as if I’m dealing with a disk failure. Wish me luck.

*Update: The second part of this article can be found here.

I’d recently been struggling with a .NET application that sends email via SMTP through Exchange 2007 outside of my domain at work. That is, until I found a workaround that uses the Exchange 2007 Pickup folder. This eliminated my authentication hassles and resolved the dreaded Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Unable to relay error. I’ve posted the solution here, but I also suggest reading the original post.

SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient("EXCHANGESRV", 25) {
    DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory,
    PickupDirectoryLocation = "\\EXCHANGESRV\PickupFolder"
}

Keep in mind that you’ll either need sufficient write permission on the Pickup folder or be able to impersonate somebody that does. I happen to have written about identity impersonation a few months ago. You’re in luck.

Kudos to stackoverflow.com. I only wish I had enough rep to upvote the submitter. :(