I plan to buy a new wifi router with the intention of installing dd-wrt right away. One of the features I plan to use is attaching a USB harddrive to the router and using it to backup (using rsync) my laptop and desktop.
As far as I can google, dd-wrt shares files through SAMBA. I know it's not the prefered option for Ubuntu users and we would prefer NFS, but does anyone know how bad or good it is this setup?
Does anyone here use dd-wrt as a file server succesfully?
If you just want to rsync to it, you can run it over ssh.
You can also browse files over SSH, even mount it permanently. For just moving files around, it's a bit slower and resource intensive than plain samba or NFS but for running rsyncd, it should be fine.
NFS isn't compiled into the dd-wrt kernel so if you want to use it, you need to use the userspace version which is somewhat slower.
Routers don't tend to be the best fileservers. They have a great networking stack but the interface between the router and the drive is pretty slow. On top of that CPU overhead that wouldn't be noticed on a proper server can cause a little router quite a lot of stress.
There are also possible security ramifications of running a precious service like a fileserver on something with a direct connection to the wild.
A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device would probably give you better performance and not cost all that much. A lot of the QNAP devices are multi-protocol aware and perform quite well.
I have an Asus WL-520GU router with Tomatousb 1.28. I have a 2TB drive attached to it through the USB port. I set the router up for "yes, authentication required" in filesharing and put in a username and password. I used Tomato because I read that it had better USB support - no idea if that is true.
On my computer I have Maverick installed. I put the following line in my fstab file:
//192.168.1.1/share /MountPoint cifs rw,nosuid,nodev,default_permissions,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=002,username=unamefromrouter,password=pwfromrouter
This lets the main user create/delete and all others read. Not totally sure what packages I had to install to make cifs available (smbclient maybe?). I use luckybackup to backup to it by just pointing to the MountPoint folder. It works pretty good except sometimes it will gag if I try to watch a movie while running a backup. I can actually play movie iso files directly from it with VLC(but occasional stutter if using wireless).