Peter:
Finding the NAS on your network for the first time is definitely one of the toughest processes of getting going with this device. The only suggestion I can make that hasn't already been mentioned is to open a Terminal and type "arp -a" without the quotes. This will show every device on your network, and one of those IP addresses should be the NAS.

Danny:
I've noticed this issue between using the disk over NFS and Samba as well. It seems like Micronet still has some permissions issues to work out in the firmware. The only suggestion I can make is to make sure you are connecting from FTP and later on using the same username. I would not login via FTP anonymously, because that's almost sure to write files to the disk using some anonymous FTP account that won't be writable via any other method.

I'll be installing the updated firmware this week, so I'll keep in touch if I notice any changes in this respect.