School of Engineering (ENG)

With the recent arrival of NAS drives on the technology market, there is yet to be a drive that can fully meet the requirements of users ranging from highly experienced to very inexperienced. NAS or Network Accessible Storage functions similar to a USB external hard drive, the main difference being NAS drives are only accessible over a network.

NAS drives are distributed with a light Linux operating system with NetBIOS shares to access the data. This operating system often has very little support for expandability, using different techniques it's possible to deploy multiple applications which will allow the user to fully utilise the potential of the NAS drive. The main problem area with the current generation of NAS drives is the lack of support for interaction with the user's data through web technologies.

The main aim of this project is to deploy several applications to the Linux operating system which are used by many users on a day to day basis. After the applications are deployed successfully, a user interface will be built that can provide interaction with the distributed applications and the users data. This will involve breaking the security on the NAS drive to begin with so access via SSH can be achieved. Using development tools a new run time environment can be setup on a Linux host; this can then compile the necessary files to deploy the application. Along with these newly deployed applications a web interface can be implemented by utilizing several web languages including: PHP CSS and HTML.