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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#341

Post by ValentineC »

tetris11 wrote: post #211
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem very attracted to Synology because it requires very little thought & effort. FWIW the new Ugreen NAS run Debian. I don't know a ton about it, but it's be great if they could stay a little more up to date. This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus.

I'm attracted to them because you can find them secondhand on ebay for very cheap, and their power draw / performance ratio is quite decent compared to other systems. I will say that the Ugreen NAS seems to offer more performance for less watts, so it's definitely something I will keep an eye on in the future if it pops up on Ebay. > This Synology story with ancient forks & weird encryption sounds truly bogus. It's n…

> It's not. My Synology is running Linux kernel v4, and I opted to use their "SHR" RAID configuration and can confirm that it's some weird BTRFS variant that is likely deadlocked due to the kernel.

SHR is mostly MD-RAID and LVM, and works with ext4 too.

Re: The Synology End Game

#342

Post by horsawlarway »

M95D wrote: post #246
horsawlarway wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks. 10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this. In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day. Over the entire lifetime of the…

I've done the calculations just now: 10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more. The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the…

You've picked incredibly long time ranges and you still have small numbers.

3k over 20 years is literally nothing.

It's lost change in the couch compared to almost any other financial decision you could make.

Re: The Synology End Game

#343

Post by Dylan16807 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #213
plqbfbv wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this. I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months. I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it. Synology still scores ve…

Most of the other commenters do not seem to understand the difference between "low maintenance", "low maintenance by someone very skilled in the art", and "no maintenance". Things that maintain themselves are amazing and I want more of them in my life. Anything that requires shell commands is out out out . That is for younger people.

You're being pretty vague so it's hard to respond to. But if someone suggests some version of Linux and then leaving it alone, that's no maintenance.

Re: The Synology End Game

#344

Post by Dylan16807 »

plqbfbv wrote: post #217
fooqux wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it. And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies. Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it'…

A custom Arch install is what I have on my router. There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching). The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the…

What I get from this is to stay very far away from Arch if I want to update regularly and not fuss with it. But that's not an indictment of distros designed to be stable.

And your experience of Arch with automatic updates is very different from their semi-suggestion of Arch with no updates.

As for ZFS, I don't use it for root, in part so that even when I mess with things I know it'll boot fine. But that only applies to root.

Re: The Synology End Game

#346

Post by ranger_danger »

_def wrote: post #303
atlasduo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit. Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on…

This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?

I think there's actually no point in being profitable, it always seems to lead to even more greed, power and corruption.

Better to have a heart, care more about your customers, don't put profits first, but still make enough to keep the lights on.

I think that would make everyone happier anyways.

Re: The Synology End Game

#347

Post by finaard »

tecleandor wrote: post #48

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…

At a customer I ended up having to help one department running two Synology boxes as a side project. I came in with low expectations, and still was thoroughly disappointed.

- one device died, was EOL at that point, and newer ones no longer can read the disks - stupid limits for array size. Depending on your setup adding disks can mean "copy everything off, delete arrays, and then create new ones". Also, want one 200TB array with your disks? Depending on model size you'll have to do multiple arrays instead with a bit to way lower capacity - syncing a share to another instance is broken, with pretty much no useful debug information. Already the setup is stupid (doesn't let you select which array it goes on the target machine), and then seems to change access permissions of the sync user on the target box (i.e., you can do one sync, after that you'll need to reset the access permissions). I wanted to avoid doing my own sync script, but seems I'll have to do that in the end - stupid disk compatibility warnings (which currently you can disable when you have SSH access) - wireguard only via third party addons. It's 2025. I didn't even check before if those things can do wireguard - it didn't occur to me that a device sold nowadays might not be able to do that.

While debugging I also noticed that pretty much every software component is from the stone age.

Re: The Synology End Game

#348

Post by tecleandor »

HighGoldstein wrote: post #336
Shank wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen? Not to defend Synology, but popping a drive out of the NAS so that it won't be noticed (or noticed much later) is a much easier way to steal data than carrying off the whole NAS. I assume they're guarding against the kind of scenario where an employee steals steals drives rather than ski-masked thieves breaching the office and making off with th…

But a single drive in a RAID is worth almost nothing.

Re: The Synology End Game

#349

Post by hedora »

itsrobreally wrote: post #306
edem wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the current options? I've been looking but I haven't found any. I have a DS923+ and it works fine, but I can already see what you are talking about.

I just got a Ugreen 2800 to replace a homemade NAS, I had a Synology for a few years but it got slower and slower as the software changed so I ditched it maybe 10 years ago? One of the things that sold me on the Ugreen was that it is basically just a garden-variety N100 box, upgradeable RAM, supports SATA and M.2, etc. According to this installing your own OS doesn't invalidate the warranty so if I decide their softw…

I built two intel atom nas machines before switching to synology.

One has no linux or windows video drivers (Intel’s fault — no transcoding), and caught fire (not intel’s fault).

The other was one of the ones where the clock signal is basically a doomsday countdown timer. I had to swap it out for a warranty board for some other reason.

So, there’s no way I’d consider an N100. Other options?

Re: The Synology End Game

#350

Post by detaro »

gvalkov wrote: post #110
detaro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not the smallest, but the Fractal Node 304 is nice IMHO.

I'm using that case with with a 200mm fan front-panel mod[1]. Despite its size, it gets pretty cramped. It's just hard to keep it organized without a dedicated SATA backplane. [1]: https://www.printables.com/model/866109-200mm-fan-front-for-...

true, but I'm also not a fan of backplanes, so I just deal with it.
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