Well, it looks like the final nail in Microsoft’s coffin is not far off. They are now resorting to suing their competition rather than say, oh, out-competing. Brian Proffitt’s article on IT World offers up the gory details.

I loved this quote from one of Microsoft’s weasels councils:

Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market.

I took the liberty to translate the double-speak into English:

Their refusals to be extorted into buying meaningless licenses leaves us no choice but to use our ill gotten gains from years of monopoly rule to financially punish them by dragging out meaningless legal claims in the courts until such time that they relent into paying us for nothing or we bankrupt them. We must defend our lack of innovation so that we can continue to stifle technological advances and continue to sell our shitty software under long-since-dead per-seat pricing models to the unsuspecting corporate yes-men and slack-jawed middle managers that are our life’s blood.

The D-Link DNS 323 is an extremely affordable SAN solution for a home or small business network.  And since Bonjour support has been cooked into firmware version 1.09 it is now even more useful for Mac users.  However, out of the box it still cannot be recognized by TimeMachine as a valid backup drive.  Infuriating to say the least, however, with a bit of time and perceverance it is possible.

Firstly, you will need to fun plug your DNS 323.  Excellent instructions are found at the DNS323 Wiki site which is an excellent resource for all your DNS 323 hackery needs.

Secondly, you need to add AFP support.

Lastly, do the following command on the command line to get TimeMachine to recognize network drives which it does not do by default (really Apple?  Why?!?):


defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

That’s it.  You should be able to point TimeMachine at your DNS 323 and you are good to go!

Note that you used to have to trick the Mac into using the SAN as a backup drive but I did not find this to be the case with my latest setup, but if you are having trouble, read A Poor Man’s Apple Time Capsule.

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