Benjamin,
My DNS-323 is at firmware 1.09. My PC OS is Linux so I would prefer to use NFS to connect to the DNS-323, but I found D-Link's NFS plugin to be so unreliable that I ended up removing it. When I had the NFS plugin installed it would work OK for a while but eventually the DNS-323 would become unresponsive via NFS as well as the Web configuration interface. It continued to respond to pings and a port scan showed that it was listening on http, NFS, etc., but yet it stopped responding to anything but ping. Holding down the power button to force a shutdown did no good, leaving the only recourse to pull the power cord.
As far as I could determine, I had two options:
1. Forget about NFS and use Samba to mount the DNS-323. Unfortunately, the DNS-323's Samba doesn't support the UNIX extensions so there's no way to store Linux file ownership or permissions. Not a great option functionally, but at least it works without having to resort to third-party add-ons.
2. Install the free third-party 'ffp' package and run the included NFS server. I ran this way for quite some time. The NFS server was quite stable, but I decided to uninstall 'ffp' once I discovered that the hard drive file system wasn't being cleanly unmounted due to a ffp-related processes not being stopped during a DNS-323 shutdown or reboot. I found an 'ffp' add-on called 'cleanboot' that worked around this problem well enough to permit reboot to work cleanly if initiated from the Web GUI but shutdown worked cleanly only if done from a Telnet or SSH login to the DNS-323. Powering off with the power switch or the Web GUI would result in an unclean shutdown. 'ffp' also seemed to interfere with the Web GUI's disk scan utility. An 'fsck' could be done with another 'ffp' add-on; running it involves booting the DNS-323 to an alternate Linux kernel. My take on 'ffp' is that it could be used to help make the DNS-323 a reasonably stable file server but at the cost of having to do certain operations (e.g., shutdown, fsck) outside the supplied Web interface. 'ffp' is fairly easy to install and uninstall unless you decide to save a change to something like /etc/passwd to flash memory. (I'd saved /etc/passwd with a root password to flash. That was fine for running 'ffp' processes, but if I booted without 'ffp' any D-Link native process that ran as 'root' was liable to fail. I fixed the problem by booting once more with 'ffp' and reflashing an /etc/passwd with a null root password.)
I finally decided to remove D-Link's NFS add-on and live with native Samba/CIFS mode. It's reasonably stable this way but I do miss being able to use Linux file ownership and permissions. Too bad the NFS add-on is so unstable! If you don't mind turning your DNS-323 into a (fairly slow) little Linux server you might want to check into 'ffp' with 'cleanboot' and 'fsck'. To find 'ffp', just Google for 'dns-323 ffp'.
Dave
Author
Topic: DNS-323 Freezing (Read 5181 times)