Thecus N7770-10G Elite-Class Business 7-Bay NAS Review

Setup – Users, Services & Files

One of the things you’ll both need initially and probably quite often down the line is the user and group authentication pages.

Users

We already got our static administrator user and the one that we created during the initialization, but there is a good chance that we need a whole bunch more for everyone that needs access to this amazing NAS.

Creating new users is very easy and it doesn’t require much: A username and a password. You can also change the default user ID and assign groups if you already created any.

Thecus OS has one of the best features for mass user creation and it is very simple at the same time. You can create a text file with all the information or just manually paste it into the edit field. User, password, and user group separated by a comma and one per line, that’s the only rule. This batch function will create both users and groups if they don’t already exist.

User Groups

The easiest way to maintain access rights to a lot of users at the same time is user groups. We have one by default for all users and we can create pretty much as many more as we’d like.

Creating new groups is even easier than users. All you need is a name and optionally you can select existing users to add right away and change the group ID.

Network Services

The network services is another place you’ll want to visit, that is if you want to use anything else than Windows-shares that are enabled by default.

But just because they aren’t enabled, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t all there. AFP and Time Machine for Apple users as well as NFS for Linux and Unix users is there.

Both FTP and TFTP are present in basic forms and the only thing I really miss here is an FXP enable/disable function.

You can naturally set up SSL connections for your web services in case you need those. Most home users won’t, but if you are a business then there is a good chance that you will need this.

UPnP service can be enabled to save you the hassle of setting up network information and routing manually and DDNS is also supported for those who don’t have a static IP address but need to be able to access the NAS from everywhere.

The UPnP port management allows the NAS to set the configurations in your router if UPnP is supported by the router and enabled. This is a lot easier to do when setting up new services than it is to multitask and manually set it in the router; keep the settings where they belong.

While we are in this area, we’ll take a short look at the auto thumbnail creation. This is particular useful for users who access their photo folders via the mobile app T-OnTheGo.

Shared Folders

On the previous page I skipped two points and one of them was the normal shared folders that will be available when you browse your network neighborhood. There are some default folders for the apps and features the NAS is born with and you can create all the ones you need on top of that.

I really like Thecus way of assigning user and groups to the ACL settings. Select either of the clearly categorized users or groups and hit the plus button where you want to them to be.

iSCSI shares

Business users, and more enthusiast users as well, have discovered the power of iSCSI setups and Thecus OS supports this too on the N7770-10G. Windows 7 and newer all have iSCSI initiators build into the operating system, making it an obvious choice where thin-provisioning prevents a lot of wasted space.

How you set it up comes down to your own needs and you can find a lot of tutorials for it around the web. This is nothing that you should be afraid off, even when you never done it before.