Thecus N4810 4-Bay SMB and Enthusiast NAS Review

Setup: Privileges (Users, Groups, Shared Folders, & Services)

Shared Folders

The traditional way to share files from your NAS is by the use of Shared Folders. Creating these is a breeze, and you’ll quickly have all the folders you need to sort your data in a way that suits your access behaviour.

The only two mandatory settings for a share creation is to pick a drive volume to create it on and give it a name. However, there are plenty of other options and descriptions that you set too.

Access to a folder is set by user or user groups, and you decide who has what kind of access.

Linux users can also edit their share settings directly from the same page.

User Accounts

We should never use our administrator user for everyday connections and especially not store the password anywhere for easy login. So you need to create at least one more user for yourself and your daily usage of the NAS. Most likely you’ll also create more users, but that’s all optional.

The only mandatory information needed are a username and a password. Optionally, you can set user quota, group belonging, and application rights.

There is also a batch creation method that allows you easy creation of multiple accounts at once. There’s a sample file for download which will teach you the formatting.

Groups

Micro-managing every user on your system can be a tedious process, and that’s where user groups come into play. Assign users to groups and set the access rights and privileges for the entire group at once rather than a single user at a time.

Remote Accounts

AD and LDAP servers are supported too for a centralised user management.

File Services

Thecus offers all the file services that you could wish for with Samba, Apple File Protocol, NFS, FTP, TFTP, WebDAV – and they all contain all the settings options that you could wish for, including SMB3.

The built-in web server can be modified in several ways too, mainly when it comes to the connection type and whether you want to use SSL or not.

All installed services and functions can automatically assign their ports in your router thanks to UPnP and this is a feature that makes the setup a lot easier.