Hi all,

Recently I posted a new thread concerning some troubles I had with a, as it turned out, defective TViX 5100-SH unit.

Yesterday I finally received a replacement unit so finally a lift-off.... at least so I thought.... getting a harddrive to be recognized on both the unit and my Mac turned out to be a lot harder then I had hoped.

A few misconceptions:

- the 5100-SH does NOT support HFS(+), even though previous models, like the 3000, do!

- Getting ext2, the unofficially supported Linux file-format, to work on Mac OSX is far from hassle-free. Formatting the drive even causes a kernel-panic and mounting is not so transparent as usual.

- A 5100-SH unit wired (@100 MBit) to a Airport Extreme (100MBit + 802.11n) and a Macbook Pro wirelessly (@300 MBit) does not result in the same or better speed than both machines wired to the router or directly. Streaming media results in audio-lag, hick-ups and even worse: stuttering.


So.... here's what you SHOULD do:


enable NFS under Leopard


In Terminal.app:

sudo vi /etc/exports

Here you will add a line as follows (in my example I have an external drive called "LaCie.500GB"):

/Volumes/LaCie.500GB -network 192.168.0.0 -mask 255.255.0.0

For those unknown with vi, you can go to insert-mode with "i". When done editing press Escape and enter ":wq" to write the text to file and quit vi.


Then enable the NFS-daemon

sudo nfsd enable

or restart the daemon

sudo nfsd restart

Then check your mounts:

showmount -e



add network-connection on TViX

Add a network connection on your TViX with the IP-address of your Mac and as source use the folder or volume you added to /etc/export (in my example: "/Volumes/LaCie.500GB/"


Harddrive installation

For those of you opting for a harddrive: NTFS is your best option.
Why? Because NTFS for Mac from Paragon Software delivers great performance and stability, even better than the built-in support for FAT32.

HFS(+) is, unfortunately, a no-go. I don't know why those guys at DVico stripped the newer models of this great feature, but it's a serious pain in the ass.
Secondly, ext2 is (unofficially) supported by DVico, but the driver for Mac OSX is very buggy to say the least.




I hope this will help you guys out! :)

This might save someone the hours of troubleshooting it cost me.....

When you share a volume from the Mac via NFS, turn on "ignore ownership on this volume" I didn't do that on a newly created share and couldn't figure out why I could see the share just fine from all my Macs, but the TViX could only see some of the files. Reformatting the RAID, Disk First Aid, Copying media back to the problematic volume, renaming the volume, re-exporting the volume all had zero effect on the problem. A day later and I finally notice that one little difference between that volume and the rest of the shares.

IGNORE OWNERSHIP ON THIS VOLUME needs to be turned on for your TViX to see all the files. I presume you could also fix things by changing permissions on all the files, but it's simpler to Get Info on the volume and checkmark that one setting.

BTW, all my volumes are neither FAT32 nor NTFS. They are Mac OS Extended with journaling to allow me greatest flexibility with my system tools on the host system. NFS sharing takes care of the file system difference for the TViX. So, the TViX simply sees things as NFS volumes while the Macs see native Mac volumes.