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[GeeTee]

I know the DNS-321 has been phased out, but there will be a lot of them out there for a few years, so I am passing this on.

I own eight D-Link NASs on a GB Network.  All are running RAID 1 and are either 1TB or 1.5TB.  Four are DNS-321 and four are DNS-323.  A few weeks ago I discovered that a drive in one of the units had failed by luck:  I stumbled into it while doing something else.  Fortunately, there was no harm done with the drive failure and Western Digital was nice enough to replace the drive.  Feeling dumb about this, I decided to set up the NASs for email notification so I would not have to stumble into a drive failure.  Here is where the fun started. 

My ISP is Cox Cable.  I have set up countless applications and devices to send emails on Cox.  These DNS-321's defied my best efforts.  I double checked everything, even the Gateway IP and the DNS IP.  I even used the IP for the Cox SMTP URL, just in case there was a DNS issue.  The result was failure after failure.

I took a day off to let my brain settle.  I then tried setting up a DNS-323.  All the important settings on the 323 are the same as the 321.  The 323 has an additional setting for port.  I left the port at the default of 25 since that is what the Cox SMTP expects.  Everything worked just fine!  I repeated this on the other three 323's and all sent emails with no problems.

I remembered something I had read about using gmail for DNS-321's, so I experimented with one of the 321's using my gmail info.  Wah-Hoo, it worked.  It worked on all four DNS-321's so I set up my gmail account to auto-forward those emails to my Cox account.  What a fire drill!  The problem is not with Cox Cable nor with my ability to put the correct numbers in the correct spaces.  The problem is with the DNS-321.  Whatever is broken in the DNS-321 will stay broken since it is obsolete, but this is my work-around.

I thought I would pass this info on since there are quite a few DNS-321's out there.

Have a good day.   

[Noah0504]

I've got email working on my DNS-321, at least the test emails work.  I've configured the unit to send me emails for certain things and have it configured to run a quick S.M.A.R.T. test once a week.

I just realized this morning that I'm not getting any of those emails.  I logged back into the unit to make sure I hadn't messed with the email settings, and testing the setting succeeded once again.  I'm not sure if the unit needs to be rebooted or what.  I will mess with this later tonight, but I just wanted to know what alerts you have setup and if you're getting them.

[GeeTee]

Thanks for the input.  I will test that later tonight and post.   

[GeeTee]

Hi Noah0504,

All of my eight DNS's are set up to email for Drive Failure, Volume Degraded and Volume Rebuild Complete.  Other than the test email, I never had seen any emails.  I just tested two of my DNS-321's and two of my DNS-323's successfully.  I set them up to email Space Status every 2 minutes.  All worked as planned.  I am assuming and hoping it will work as well with the Drive Failure option.

I am not sure I understand how emailing the SMART status is supposed to work on a 321.  I have viewed SMART data manually, but there is no information on what happens when you check the box in the email tool.  I cannot figure out what would be used as a trigger since SMART runs continually.  I tested this on one of my 321's by checking the box and nothing happened.  I then ran a SMART test on both drives and nothing was sent.  The picture in the User Manual does not even show a "Send Log File" and "Send SMART Test Result" option.  Coincidentally, the DNS-323 has neither the SMART nor the Log File function.  I think I would chalk this up to another partially thought through and partially tested piece of firmware.   

I hope that helps.