The last week has seen two of my crowdfunding investments delivered. The first of those two was Lima. Lima is a small box that connects between my home network and a USB hard drive and promises to make my documents & media files appear on my computers, and mobile devices no matter where I am, or which device I am using. My own personal DropBox. 

The device arrived last week, but I ordered a new 4TB RAID 1 external drive for it that didn’t arrive until this week. Tonight was set up time. 

Short Cables

The first thing I noticed is that both the Ethernet and power supply cables are short. That gave me some headaches with positioning (solved by swapping the Ethernet cable for one a little longer). Having got everything set up, and the drive reformatted to HFS+ (it shipped in NTFS format) and configured as RAID 1 rather than the RAID 0 default configuration, I started the setup from my MacMini.

Setup Problem

First time through I ended up with an error.

Retrying did not help. Rebooting the Lima did not help. Rebooting the Mac made it worse. Now when the Lima app launched I got a white box instead of the app.

Solved that by deleting /Library/Application Support/Lima, but still couldn’t get the setup to complete. After a few other attempts I got a different error:

And that’s where I got stuck. I have sent the team at Lima all the screenshots, descriptions an Console logs. Hopefully the update due out soon will address whatever issue is blocking my setup from completing.

First Impression?

While the software on the Mac looks polished, there is clearly still work to be done to make it stable (it is beta release software, so that is expected). Not being able to access some features, or finding occasional crashes is also expected. Being unable to complete the initial setup & account creation though leaves me a little concerned.