the birdhouse in my soul

The new QNAP firmware (3.4.0) supports 802.1q VLAN tagging, but you can't create multiple interfaces in different VLANs on the same physical interface through the webinterface. In the case of link aggregation (LACP 802.3ad for example), that means only 1 VLAN and 1 IP address can be used. Fortunately, QNAP allows full access to the underlying Linux system. Adding a VLAN interface goes like this (the example uses VLAN 234) # /usr/local/bin/vconfig add bond0 234 # ifconfig bond0.234 192.168.2.30 broadcast 192.168.2.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 of course, this change is not permanent, a reboot will not automatically start this interface. I'll blog about making it permanent later.

Good news for those of us with QNAP units in our environments. On the VMworld partner exhibition floor, my sources confirmed that VLAN tagging support has been implemented, and will be released in firmware 3.4. QNAP has release 3.3.3 recently, and it's unknown when 3.4 will be released.

I recently added a dedicated storage box to my lab environment. After a week these are my first impressions: Pro: Small. I needed a shallow rack-mountable device, and this one is perfect, only about 50cm deep. Fast. I knew that a NAS device like this wouldn't be the speed king of the storage world, but I'm pleasantly surprised. Open software. It runs Linux, you get SSH access to your device, and you can add packages if you want. Evidently, I added tools like dstat to keep an eye on things. Compatibility. Used it from Windows Vista, VMware vSphere, and Linux (CentOS and others). No problems at all. Cheap. I could have gone for an EMC Symmetrix instead, but decided against it :-) Con: Fragile. Just a bit. The SATA ports of the disk drives slide directly in sata plugs inside the device. I hope I won't have to re-plug drives all too often. Not all operations happen online. QNAP advertises RAID1 to RAID5 migration, and it does that, by using one of the mirrored drives and the n...