i have been reluctant to figure out how to get thing time machine backups to work on my NAS because the first time i tried, it didn’t work out, but i tried again tonight and it was actually pretty straightforward once i understood what i needed to do.

the first thing i had to do was enable the network interface en0. on my machine, for some reason, en1 and en2 were enabled for the wireless and ethernet interfaces. i renamed the ethernet (en2) to en0 by following the instructions in this post which tells you to:
1) delete
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist (backup first)
2) edit /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

then i followed the instructions from appleclinic to set up the time machine share on the NAS.

now, time machine is backing up 47GB of data. it’s taking a long time, but it appears to be working great. once the initial backup is done, the backups will be done wirelessly nightly. nice and convenient. it’s time to setup my desktop to see this NAS time machine share.