How to build your own NAS – Part 4

Now that you have your NAS up and running you may need to make changes to the share setup, install updates, etc. and since you don't want to have a display, keyboard and mouse attached to it, you will need a way to remotely administer your NAS. That's where Webmin comes into play.

Webmin is a web-based interface for
system administration for Unix/Linux systems, allowing you to manage user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, etc. Download the latest version of Webmin (currently 1.500) from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.500_all.deb and save it to a folder on your Ubuntu machine. Now locate the downloaded file, which should end with the extension .deb, and double-click the on the file with the left mouse button. When prompted, select Install package and provide your password when asked.

As you can see, working with this particular flavour of Linux is almost as easy and intuitive as working with Windows, and you may even feel tempted to experiment with using Linux for your everyday computing. If you decide to do so, there are plenty of applications out there, mostly free, to allow you to do pretty much everything you do in a Windows environment.

When you finish installing Webmin all you need to do now is open a web browser on a different machine (or the same, if you want) and type in the IP address or your NAS followed by the port number to which Webmin is listening (port 10000 by default), for example http://192.168.1.10:10000 or use the computer name in the same way, http://NAS:10000. If you are accessing Webmin from the Linux machine where it is installed you can even use http://localhost:10000. When you access the Webmin web page on your NAS you will be confronted with a security certificate that your computer will not recognize as valid. Don't worry, just click on "Continue to this website (not recommended)" if you are using Internet Explorer or on "I understand the risks", "Add exception" and "Confirm security exception" if using Mozilla Firefox and a login page will come up. Login to your NAS using the username and password from the Linux computer and you will be redirected to a Status page where you can see some statistics about your NAS and a menu on the left of the page.

On this menu, you are mostly interested in "Servers", Samba Windows File Server", which allows you to manage your file sharing from any computer in the network. If you want more control over your machine remotely you may want to explore running the SSH server and accessing the NAS with a SSH client ("Putty" is a free telnet/SSH client).

Now that your NAS is fully up and running you can watch movies, pictures or listen to movies from any computer in the network, besides the storing and sharing of files.

Hope you enjoy playing with your homemade NAS!