July 9th, 2007 | 
I was an early adopter of the Terastation when it was released a few years ago. The Terastation is a pretty typical (well, now pretty typical) SOHO-type NAS that is a fairly inexpensive solution to getting loads-o-disk space on your local network. It’s not screamingly fast, but it’s got loads of features including a good web interface, some basic security, gigabit networking, multiple RAID configurations for its four drives, including RAID 5 and a built in media server that works very well with Buffalo’s excellent LinkTheater media players.
Having all this happiness with the solution only made for that much more dismay when I discovered that Vista doesn’t play nicely with the Terastation. For the most part, machines running Vista can’t see what’s on shared folders hosted on the Buffalo NAS. Like most problems, though, I was able to find a resolution to this issue by searching the web. It’s always a good thing when you realize that no matter how much of an early adopter of technology you are, they is always someone who has blazed the trail ahead of you.
The bottom line is that Vista puts security in front of functionality and all you have to do to get the Terastation to work is mildly circumvent some of that protection. I found the very nicely described solution on the Scale|Free blog. It’s pretty easy to implement and I’m sure applies to other NAS solutions that may not have yet been updated to play nice with Vista.
- Run the Local Security Policy app – secpol.msc
- Go to Local Policies | Security Options and choose the “Network Security: LAN Manager Authentican Level” item
- Set it to “Send LM & NLTM, use NTMLv2 session if negotiated”
Basically, Vista is set up to use NTMLv2 only. All this change is doing is adding the old LM security protocol back into the mix while still using the newer protocol when it’s called for.
Works like a charm.
Related posts:
Category:
How quiet/loud is the Terastation? I have an iomega network hard drive, and it’s unacceptably loud.
Jason,
It’s pretty quiet. It has an internal power supply, not an external brick (I hate those things), but it means there is a fan. That, plus 4 drives means it’s not silent. I can’t really complain, though. Compared to other stuff I have around it’s relatively quiet.
Sorry, that’s not too quantitative an answer. All I can really tell you is that it’s not LOUD. I’d bet you could find some noise information on Buffalo’s site.
Thanks. My goal was to get a NAS that was quieter than my computer, and the iomega drive definitely isn’t.
Hi Will,
I bought the Buffalo LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD but can’t get it to work with my Window Vista. Any suggestion of how to fix it?
Rgds,
Alvin
Alvin,
Hmmm. The LinkTheater server doesn’t run under Vista, huh? In a bit of searching I found this problem several times. Apparently, Buffalo is working on this, so you should check their web site.. This page – http://www.buffalo-technology.com/support/vista-compatibility/ – states that it “will” be compatible.
I found several other sites that stated: “The bundled software wouldn’t install on my Vista PC (Buffalo is working on a fix), but Vista’s own UPnP server worked just fine.” You may want to try the built-in Vista stuff.
I am running the server on a Windows Server 2003 machine with no problems, but it doesn’t surprise me that it has troubles with Vista.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Good luck.
I have Vista Home and apparently it doesn’t come with secpol.msc so I am screwed unless someone can explain how to do the registry settings manually, or how to get this file for my version of Vista. Any advice?
Brian,
Apparently, you can do the following on Vista Home:
1. Run regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Lsa
Create the following DWORD value (if it doesn’t exist, if it does exist, just change it): “LmCompatibilityLevel” (no quotes)
3. Then modify the new value so that its value data is: “1″ (no quotes).
That should do it. I haven’t tried this method, but I’ve seen it several places after I put together this post.
Good luck!
Jason,
Thanks very much buddy. I have just moved to Vista and couldn’t get to my linkstation on the network, your post has just fixed my problems
Now only if I can stop Vista blue screening on shutdown when I have my draytek usb wireless card plugged in.
Cheers,
Mark.
whoops sorry it should be Will and not Jason…my bad…
My pleasure Mark,
Glad it helped.