Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Synology End Game

lowendbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 360 posts

Re: The Synology End Game

#351

Post by mihaaly »

benoau wrote: post #293
mihaaly wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our organization joined this trend some years ago. The original founders (did ca. 30-35 years ago) passed 60 and cashing out. Sold the company to an investor. Small fish, <100 employee, but in a niche of engineering app development with long time clients, very long time clients. Since then, we are a self declared sales oriented organization, company meetings are about success stories of billing more for the same serv…

Sounds like they're only missing an epiphany about offshoring the engineering!

Since engineering is a "cost center", that must be decreased, it is a potential scenario, yes.

The other is to fuck engineering. Sell what we currently have, until we can, as expensive as we can, and do not spend on engineering. That is only taking away the money! Can put on some AI glitter to dazzle, but that's it. No one knows what AI is in this narrow field anyway, we can position ourself as revolutionary inventors for anything weird or new. Some will eat up this s*t for sure. Short term is paramount!

Re: The Synology End Game

#352

Post by snapplebobapple »

The thing with synology is they do the basic stuff but they also do two things I haven't found a viable, open source alternative for: 1. o365 backup. There used to be corso, which looked promising but still needed ag ui frontend to be viable, but the entire team got bought by someone and abandoned the project.

2. agent based full machine backup. I can install the agent on a machine (but especially a windows machine) and it just backs up on my schedule and works, plus is easy to convert the resulting backup image to a vm to load on the synology or my proxmox cluster. There are lots of moderately to very expensive proprietary solutions that do this, but I am unaware of any decent opensource options.

Are you guys aware of anything that solves these two use cases well and is opensource?

Re: The Synology End Game

#353

Post by exmadscientist »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #343
exmadscientist wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, unattended Linux installs tend to rot pretty badly. They're fine for a while, then either some update goes badly wrong (usually of the "well, we expected you to go from v4 to v5, but we never tested v2 to v5" variety, far down some dependency chain) and requires heroic skills to recover; or the system just point-blank refuses to update after a while, again requiring heroic skills to recover. FreeBSD has been better for me once running, but requires more work for initial setup.

So, no, my experience is that unattended Linux is not really suitable. Your experience may vary.

What I want is something that's more like an appliance than a project. You do not look at your toaster every day and wonder if it needs to perform updates. Or your washing machine. (If you do, please, seek help.) These are appliances. I want an appliance that serves me bits, lots of them, and lets me use multiple machines without caring too much which one has which file. My Synology has, to date, been excellent at that role.

Re: The Synology End Game

#354

Post by Dylan16807 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #353
Dylan16807 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, unattended Linux installs tend to rot pretty badly. They're fine for a while, then either some update goes badly wrong (usually of the "well, we expected you to go from v4 to v5, but we never tested v2 to v5" variety, far down some dependency chain) and requires heroic skills to recover; or the system just point-blank refuses to update after a while, again requiring heroic skills to recover. FreeBSD…

> either some update goes badly wrong [...] or the system just point-blank refuses to update

You don't understand, in that post I'm talking about purposefully not updating. At all. Updates can't go wrong if they don't happen. If it refuses to update then you win.

> What I want is something that's more like an appliance

Yeah, you get it! Set it up and then leave it alone.

And don't expose it to the internet.

Re: The Synology End Game

#355

Post by JTpe18 »

Shank wrote: post #72
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…

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…

I understand Synology’s design approach. In enterprise environments, physical security - especially when systems are housed in ISO 27001–certified data centers—is relatively straightforward to achieve.

The primary value of disk/volume encryption is actually for scenarios like end-of-life replacement, RMA, failure and disposal - even if someone later reconstructs the disk sectors, the bits remain unreadable. This is one layer of defense in depth, not a substitute for physical security.

Synology also supports KMIP, which I see addressing two situations:

1. Data center key governance and media mobility - Multiple hosts (including spares) can use KMIP for centralized key management, improving the mobility of drives within the data center and reducing the operational cost of moving drives between machines. When decommissioning hardware, keys can be revoked directly in KMIP with an audit trail.

2. Edge/branch sites with weaker physical controls - By using KMIP, keys are kept in the more secure data center rather than on the edge device itself. The edge hardware stores no keys, so if an entire machine is stolen, it cannot be unlocked, preserving confidentiality.

Re: The Synology End Game

#356

Post by postexitus »

pjmlp wrote: post #214
postexitus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.

That would be true if I would have done all copies on the same day, and never duplicated disks.

You basically imply that you have a NAS that you regularly take backups to BluRay?

Re: The Synology End Game

#357

Post by newsclues »

edem wrote: post #235
plqbfbv wrote: post #126

I have used Synology NASes for a good 15y now, and the one I'm on will likely be my last (DS920). I have watched the software evolve from "quite good" to "very good" to "lets reimplement everything ourselves and close it off as much as possible". It's sad because back in the day, at least for me, the brand was the perfect UX in many regards: small form factor and low power, price-accessible 4/5 bay NASes, a couple CP…

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 bought a hexOS license when it when on sale. TrueNAS for people that don’t want to be a storage professional.

Re: The Synology End Game

#358

Post by articsputnik »

Kototama wrote: post #201
articsputnik wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what would be an option to still do it locally? without sending it to the cloud? probably needs a good compression

You could have a big external USB drive and try a deduplicating backup software such as borg backup or restic.

borg is one that pops up all the time, maybe i need to look into that more deeply. I like rsync, but it's creating huge backups. thanks for the suggestions and help, much appreciated.

Re: The Synology End Game

#359

Post by davidgerard »

I got a Synology on friends' recommendations in 2018 and have always regretted not getting a secondhand Microserver Gen 8 instead.

Next household samba box will probably be something with an N150 and unfeasible amounts of M.2.

Re: The Synology End Game

#360

Post by itsrobreally »

hedora wrote: post #349
itsrobreally wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the years between the Synology and the Ugreen I've been running a mac mini from ebay which has slower copy speeds (i had to use drives connected via usb or thunderbolt) but has been very reliable and low-power.
Post reply on HN