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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#111
post #95

For the last 20+ years I have always built my own home NAS. 6 to 8 drives. ZFS. Initially OpenSolaris, then FreeBSD, and nowadays Debian. I would hate to use a proprietary solution like Synology. I'm generally very happy with my builds, hardware-wise and software-wise. Surprisingly the most annoying thing of a custom build is that there aren't many choices of decent compact 8-drive NAS chassis (it's a small market af…

Yes, a standard Linux computer is the way to go. I would argue most people do not need complicated redundant drive setups. A regular computer with a standard SSD works fine. Probably good to start out with a new one though and not reuse an old one from an old computer.

Re: The Synology End Game

#113

I actually like their software offerings like Synology Drive and Synology Moments. Their backup solution also seem to "just work" with Hyper Backup. I'm using a Mac und tried to use Nextcloud, but my conclusion with the Nextcloud Desktop Client is, that it is buggy as hell. Especially the VFS implementation. Synology Drive in opposite just works (for me).

I have a basic Synology DS and like it (for the price). I also use their Android app to stream music and it's not stellar but works I guess. I'm more shocked by the state of samba in macOS (without additional software). Having to go to the network and manually reconnect to the NAS share every time I come back home is ... poor.

It’s so poor.

To get my mini power up, connect SMB then start some containers I made a horrific Automator app, which runs a script and just tries, sleeps then tries again until my containers can boot and access their data. It’s disgusting. But it works.

Re: The Synology End Game

#114
post #5

Thing is, they used to be so good. I had a really tricky error, they had a tech help out during daytime, so guess he stayed up late to help us out and it was amazing customer support. They went FROM THAT, to me never touching their stuff again due to this (and the surveillance station-crap they pulled with yanking out codecs). They must've had a massive brainfart in the management at that company.

Do you know why I tell my loved ones to get apple products? Because I don't want to support them. Your telling me that Synology is giving out apple levels of support in trade for vendor lock in. It sounds like the sort of thing I recommend to others because it wont be my problem. Go ask a "car guy" who has a civic or something that is LS swapped what car you should get. He's not going to recommend anything he is goin…

Yeah but the "I want a nas but I don't know anything about computers" crowd is microscopic. Choosing that for your customer base is stupid and shortsighted.

Re: The Synology End Game

#115

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it . I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it. A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and…

If all you’re doing is an smb share i don’t see how a windows box is any more effort to maintain.

Re: The Synology End Game

#116
post #38
post #35

I kept beeing a fan of Synology mainly for their apps and ease of use. I have bought a used DS920+ with 20GB or Ram - still a perfect combo of transcoding and docker. However since I started discovering the world of selfhosted apps, Synology has no unique selling point anymore. Their apps stalled in innovation and with this drama I would go for some dedicated linux hardware with docker and thats it. Most of the data…

Pretty much everything on my Synology DS920+ is running inside Docker. I think the only exception is Plex, which I've installed natively on the device – but even Plex needs to be downloaded directly from Plex because the one in the package center is outdated. When I outgrow my DS920+, I'm probably gonna build a custom Unraid machine to replace it. Most of my needs from Synology are being able to run Docker containers…

I graduated from Synology docker, to Docker compose and my world got better.

The weird quirks of Synology Docker are painful. Eg containers that won’t stop, or won’t start. It’s not easy to get into the containers (docker exec), recreating is tricky compared to copying and pasting docker-compose.yml.

Re: The Synology End Game

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably "pulling a Rolex" i.e. Go big or go home move. The thing is, the place they're moving a little dangerous. SOHO and SMB using 4-12 HDDs to serve a couple dozen people is a very small niche. Plus you can add professional photographers and videographers on top. Then what? The upmarket is very, very crowded. Will they OEM their wares to big players as entry level devices?

They are going to get absolutely smoked upmarket. There's so much competition that has basically no downside comparitively. And probably in that niche too, once people realize how cheap used hardware really is.

Orico has a 4/5 slot USB3-10gbps DAS box, which can daisy chain up to three boxes.

Get 6 boxes, daisy chain them as 2x3, connect to a powerful-ish NUC box. Install TrueNAS on it. Use the SATA port for the OS, leave the NVMe slot alone, add a 2-4 TB good SSD.

Set the SSD as a cache to that 30 disk zRAID2 or zRAID3 pool. You can have a kick-ass enthusiast level NAS box which will beat many Synology boxes with a big clue bat...

Re: The Synology End Game

#119

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

My main issue with their system is how closed it is. I got an issue where mind would randomly start writing disk like crazy and maxing cpu usage, to the point I was bothered by the noise. I’d stop all containers, leave it as close to idle as I could manage, still spiking. There was no way I could learn what was causing it. I would like to assume it was a disk maintenance process or something, but for all I know it co…

Ever since they added the "universal search" thingy, their NAS do that anytime they reach a decently large video file. Even if you turn down search indexing, media indexing, media thumbnails, ... It still kills itself with no throttling processing those files.

May or may not be what you encountered, but had a customer caught by this and found out the hard way you can't stop it. My issue is not the processing, it's the throttling, it's so crazy how the entire NAS gets taken down for like ten minutes (and that was on a racked xeon model), no samba no nfs no nothing answering anymore.

Re: The Synology End Game

#120
post #72

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit ( https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_... ). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS ( https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno... ) to act as a key vault…

maybe it has a kensington lock?
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