Sunday, August 31, 2014

Authenticating to a LaCie 2big NAS

If you have a network-attached storage device from LaCie (such as their 2big series), you probably know about the user rights assignment available for its exposed shares. They work in a very non-intuitive way, and it took me quite a bit of digging through the documentation to figure it out.

Suppose we have a LaCie 2big that exposes a share configured to be only accessible by the "bob" user account, which like all LaCie user entries has a password. (That's an account set up on the LaCie device. I'm assuming that you haven't joined the NAS to your domain, because then everything would be easy and you wouldn't need my help.) Now, Bob is at his workstation and he would like to access his NAS stuff. He goes to the LaCie share, enters his LaCie password, and... access denied.

Even if you use the DEVICE\USER format in the username field, the LaCie will reject all authentication attempts. For some reason, it really really wants you to set your workstation-side account name and password to match exactly those on the LaCie. So, if Bob's account name on his workstation is actually Robert, he's going to have to create another workstation account for use in authenticating with the LaCie. That new account will have to use the same password as is used for the LaCie-side account. And that new account is what must be sent to the NAS for authentication.

This is, to be honest, a really strange way of doing authentication. But this is how the LaCie NAS devices work, at least the 2big, and it's how you must do it. Long story short: update the account on the NAS to have the same username and password as the one on the workstation.

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