Network Drive?

Discussion
1

What do people think about us buying a network hard drive? Possibly redundent given the cloud.

I was thinking something cheap maybe £100. That can buy a TB these days not that we really need that much.

And then getting people used to saving their stuff on there instead of on the numerous desktops.

People could have a folder each. Give some redundancy. And a bit more flexibility.

And maybe a systems folder for stuff like drivers software etc.

Then you can grab the files from any PC in the space.

@systems?

Ps some of them come with cloud options to give extra redundancy. Thinking about the membership DB.

2 Likes
2

Saving copies of drivers!!!

Am I showing my age :laughing:

3

In the future:

Store a local copy of the membership DB for when the internet goes down, to maintain access control blah de blah

1 Like
4

This was looked at before and rejected, I believe.

But why not look at it again, especially after the DDOS attack.

Really like the idea of having folders on a network: working on a laptop or workstation, then cutting from the laaer cutter, etc.

My Proliant server is available still. @systems what do you think?

1 Like
5

Is yours rack mounted or tower?

6

It’s a cuboid black tower. It was in the space for ages.

7

i like the idea of this, it makes a lot of sense.

now networks and cloud stuff i am less than a beginner. would we be able to work on a file at home and then upload it to our folder on this drive, then use the file when we go to the space?

8

not sure our restrict 'net bandwitdth would be suitable for that kind of thing. Maybe some external service like dropbox, or box might be more sensible? In which case, does that end to be centralised?

9

There is already a Dropbox account setup for this purpose.

10

Great. How do we access it?

11

Is Dropbox a sustainable solution for us?

I like the idea of being able to access files across different terminals within space. I think I like the idea of saving them from home to the Space, for use when I’m there. But with over 170 members won’t Dropbox get expensive, push our data allowance, plus shift a bunch of GBs to servers around the world for no particular reason?

12

Hi All

My thought was a local storage server of some kind would be an excellent idea, with automatic deletion. The idea being it’s for temporary work while you’re in the space, getting deleted when files are say 7 days old. Then you don’t have to even remember to delete things, keeping maintenance down and convenience up.

I’m not in favour of organising permanent storage for our members, because their needs will vary so widely.

Concretely I suggest we

  • put up a small server with open storage
  • have it with autodelete at 7 days
  • accessible from internal computers only

What do people thing about this?

Best to all,
J.

5 Likes
13

Sounds a workable, useful and low-overhead solution!

14

Sounds like a good idea . But maybe a bit more than 7 days, so you don’t lose your data if you go on holiday for a week

15

Maybe if we could get some ultra micro small hard drives with a serial port we could have one we carry about on our keyring or something.

I know that sarcasm is the lowest forum of wit but in a world where USB stick costs a few quid why is this even a thing ?

16

Sounds like a great idea.

Do we actually need to set it up to delete stuff just yet?

We could trial it and see how it goes? How much it gets used, the size of the device, etc. And then think about strategies.
No?

Ild quite like to be able to save things, Like lazer cuts Indefinatly.

You can definatly set up these folders to use ftps of some kind so we can access them remotely. It’s just a matter of weather we want to or not. And how we want to configure our security.

These issues may lead on to roaming profiles but that’s a whole other can of worms that we may not want to open just yet. As in you can set a users quota on a hard drive. But that’s a chunk of setup and possibly unwanted ongoing maintenance.

17

Having a Dropbox means people can transfer from anywhere and it can be synced to all computers and deleted there are not any transfer limits just a storage limit which is fine if we keep it clear.

18

There is always something like Nextcloud, works just like Dropbox but is self hosted. Ive recently set this up myself with a Pi2 and a WD Pi drive and it works pretty well. Can run on anything capable of hosting php7 and MariaDB. Also has encryption modules available. also does ldap. Could get a couple 2TB drives and give members 10gb each, plus some extra for admin backups etc.