SheevaPlug as NAS - is this possible?

[Zoke]

I have an external 2TB USB hard drive which I currently have connected to a TV media device (running on some linux distro which I cannot alter in any way) and I would like to purchase a NAS which I would use to torrent files to the hard drive and do some unraring so I do not need to keep my laptop on while I sleep. 

I was wondering, if I purchase a SheevaPlug to which I connect the external USB drive, can I also connect the TV device to my SheevaPlug (via USB) and have the SheevaPlug act as a NAS and have the TV device think it is connected to the USB drive directly? Or should I somehow connect both the media device and the SheevaPlug to the hard drive directly (which only has 1 USB port although a mini hub could be purchased if this is even possible)? I should add that I can only connect anything to this media device through USB. It does not have a network port.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[UnaClocker]

Yes, you can use the SheevaPlug as a NAS. No, you can't hook two different computers to one USB device. Does your media playback device support ethernet? If your Sheeva is playing it's role as a NAS, your media device simply has to look for SMB shares, or a UPnP media server.

[orwellkid]

Yes, you can use the SheevaPlug as a NAS. No, you can't hook two different computers to one USB device. Does your media playback device support ethernet? If your Sheeva is playing it's role as a NAS, your media device simply has to look for SMB shares, or a UPnP media server.

Your best bet is to convert whatever machine you are serving content up with right now to XBMC (running on Ubuntu is easiest, there's prebuilt distro packages for it available with minimal googling). Then, you have two options:

Option A: The easy method. Serve up shares on your plug PC using NFS to your XBMC machine. I am currently doing this so I have come connectivity while I build

Option B: Use multiple plugs to form a true NAS. You can use open source tools to convert the multi-machine setup into a true NAS, although it's still a JBOD you will have access like a NAS. I'm working with FreeNAS at the moment and it's pretty slick. I tried OpenFiler, but it offers way more than I need -- FreeNAS is just fine.

HTH!

_O.K._

[Zoke]

There is no ethernet port available, unfortunately. That would have made things a lot easier. Thanks for the replies, guys. So if I understand correctly it is not possible to turn the SheevaPlug into a USB-only NAS or to connect two devices to one external USB hard drive?

[birdman]

a USB-only NAS

It is possible to run the Sheeva as a NAS, with the data coming from USB disks - the relevant thing is that this isn't going to be of any use to you as your TV (it might help if you mentioned the model) can't access NAS storage.

or to connect two devices to one external USB hard drive?

Can you imagine the mess as they both try to write to it at the same time, with no knowledge of what the other is doing?