Reset the Tritton Technologies Simple NAS box to Factory Defaults

The box is sold under the model numbers TRI-NSS001, TRI-NSS160, TRI-NSS200 and TRI-NSS250.

The documented procedure for resetting the Tritton Technologies Simple NAS box affects only the IP address, login and password. Other settings are unaffected. This is undocumented but probably the correct policy. It isn't clear why the documentation is misleading.

The box has some advantages over other similar boxes, in that there is some ventilation, the drive can be spun down when not in use (spin down time is configurable, default never) and the setup (provide you don't need to reset the box) is very simple compared to other network devices I have tried. Giving the box a default IP of 169.254.0.1 is particularly desirable, since it makes setup so easy for an unsophisticated user. Lastly, assembly and disassembly are quite easy (no hidden tabs) and use standard sized screws.

To set up the box, try to connect a PC to the NAS box without any connection to a DHCP server. Then both devices will come up with addresses in the 169.254 space, and be able to communicate with each other.

However, even with the PC ipconfig showing an address of 169.254.194.250/255.255.0.0 for my PC I still got "host unreachable" when pinging 169.254.0.1.

I then did an:

If I had not known about arp I would have returned the device to the store for a refund. As it is, there is still the question of why rarp didn't provide the PC with the correct MAC address. I don't have any idea what might have caused the problem, which might not be universal. I did check the arp table and there were no incorrect addresses for the NAS box during the period it was unresponsive.

The MAC address for the Simple NAS box is printed on the black plastic underside, visible when the unit is disassembled.

I would be particularly suspicious of boxes like the Netgear SC101 which use a proprietary disk format, because if your SC101 box breaks, there is no recovery of any data unless you have another SC101 box of the same rev level. The Tritton box uses FAT-32 format, which is of course very widespread.

For some reason the user guide does not suggest to the user that they disconnect from their local DHCP server and restart their PC. (Or run ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew). Only by doing so will their PC acquire an address in the 169.254.0.0 space. The Triton Technologies web site does note that the correct IP address for the Simple NAS is 169.254.0.1, rather than 169.254.71.254 as stated in the User Guide.

It is possible that if both your PC and the NAS box get DHCP service from your existing DHCP server, they will communicate with each other. How will the browser know the box IP address? It won't, but if you browse http://storage the PC apparently looks for a netbios name of "storage", which the NAS box will respond to. This only partially worked for us, hence the procedure suggested above.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg is at nber dotte org