I recently purchased Belkin's N+ Wireless router. It worked great. Easy to set up and comes up LEDs that should help troubleshoot where the problem is. One of the other features is that it comes with a mount point for USB drive. This is good since it just provides an easy way to create a local NAS. You keep the drive in one place and access it from any of your laptops.
Connecting it from Windows is easy. The usual \\belkin N+\Drive Name works. However, on linux, it did not work out of box. Looked like trouble with space in the name at first. But when I tried with IP address and it did work. I inferred space may not be the issue. I tried few suggestions from ...
http://alittlecharm.blogspot.com/2009/06/connecting-ubuntu-to-belkin-n-usb-drive.html
.. this did not work for me. Not as it is, at least.
One reason i avoided to implement these suggestion as is that it required to install smb4k which would have also installed base kde and I wasn't in big favor of installing the whole thing. I started to look for a gnome alternate to smb4k. I remembered good old linneighborhood. This is now listed as pyNeighborhood in synaptic. This internally depends on smbfs. And I think thats the missing piece. Because I did not use pyNeighborhood at all - just installing "smbfs" did the work. I could browse the drive in nautilus and also mount it using the command line.
Here is how I did for nautilus:
For nautilus, i had to do smb://ROUTE_IP/. It wont list the shares in the BELKIN group for some reasons. When prompted for password, i entered ...
Username: guest
Workgroup: BELKIN (thats how it appeared in my network neighborhood)
password: leave it empty
Remember authorization forever. And now it works like a charm.
Repeating command lines from the link I referred above...
sudo mount -t cifs -o guest,ip=ROUTER_IP,domain=BELKIN,_netdev,mand "//ROUTE_IP/My Passport/" "/media/My Passport/"
(replace ROUTER_IP, BELKIN and My Passport with your names)
Connecting it from Windows is easy. The usual \\belkin N+\Drive Name works. However, on linux, it did not work out of box. Looked like trouble with space in the name at first. But when I tried with IP address and it did work. I inferred space may not be the issue. I tried few suggestions from ...
http://alittlecharm.blogspot.com/2009/06/connecting-ubuntu-to-belkin-n-usb-drive.html
.. this did not work for me. Not as it is, at least.
One reason i avoided to implement these suggestion as is that it required to install smb4k which would have also installed base kde and I wasn't in big favor of installing the whole thing. I started to look for a gnome alternate to smb4k. I remembered good old linneighborhood. This is now listed as pyNeighborhood in synaptic. This internally depends on smbfs. And I think thats the missing piece. Because I did not use pyNeighborhood at all - just installing "smbfs" did the work. I could browse the drive in nautilus and also mount it using the command line.
Here is how I did for nautilus:
For nautilus, i had to do smb://ROUTE_IP/. It wont list the shares in the BELKIN group for some reasons. When prompted for password, i entered ...
Username: guest
Workgroup: BELKIN (thats how it appeared in my network neighborhood)
password: leave it empty
Remember authorization forever. And now it works like a charm.
Repeating command lines from the link I referred above...
sudo mount -t cifs -o guest,ip=ROUTER_IP,domain=BELKIN,_netdev,mand "//ROUTE_IP/My Passport/" "/media/My Passport/"
(replace ROUTER_IP, BELKIN and My Passport with your names)
Comments
How did you test it out ? Which tool? i'll test it out
i just tried to copy over ubuntu iso file. My transfer rate was 1MBps+...
+++++++
rsync --progress ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso ./
ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso
723488768 100% 1.38MB/s 0:08:20 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 723577177 bytes received 31 bytes 1442825.94 bytes/sec
total size is 723488768 speedup is 1.00
+++++++++
But yes, if there is a way to speed that up, that would be awesome. My pictures et. al. take a while to load in the thumbnail view - things like that.
Other than that, i dont have any regret with this product.
I'm attempting to do this using a usb SimpleDrive. It seems like there are a few partitions on the drive itself. Is there a way to see the partition names vs the actual drive name?
I can not mount /router/SimpleDrive
I think it needs to look like /router/DriveName/SimpleDrive
So, suggestions?
THANK YOU!
smb://ROUTER_IP_ADDRESS rendered in Konqueror, which lets you browse the USB storage device and get its name.
I modified your mount stthatring to have it mount as MY_USER_NAME:users rather than as root:root. This is my string:
# mount -t cifs -o guest,ip=ROUTER_IP_ADDRESS,domain=BELKIN,_netdev,mand, -o exec,rw,suid,user,uid=MY_USERNAME,gid=users,umask=0000,dmask=0000 "//ROUTER_IP_ADDRESS/MY_DEVICENAME/" "/media/MyBook/"
MY_DEVICENAME is "My Book", but of course YMMV.
Thanks again.
Kind regards, Andy
Good to know it helped you. Good tweak too.
Are you also able to comment on the speed of data transfer for you. As you would note from other comments on this post, it seems like the Belkin USB connection is 1.0 - low speed. I keep my picasa pictures and videos there and its generally not a great experience to see these do a slow slideshow.
Whats your experience so far?