CloudStation Client - Stopped Working!

[PhilthePill]

NAS and two clients all updated to the latest versions a week or so ago. Client is working OK on my Win7 PC - flags up new added files or updated files etc. Booted up my Lap Top Win7 yesterday and the client indicated "all up to date" green icon and a tick! However after working on a few things I got concerned as no flags were appearing indicating any updates. I was not able to open the client from the icon to check latest updates etc. After fiddling around a bit, closing cloud.exe process from Task Manager and then restarting I was able to access the menu, but updated files showed as "none". I did a bit more work, but still no files got updated. So I unlinked CloudStation and relinked it to my Home\CloudStation folder, but still no sign of any updates. Finally decided to uninstall and reinstall, unfortunately it will not now install and I get various error warnings. Eventually gave up and sync'd my data using Allway Sync. I will take another stab later today and report back the error messages. I recall from the original install that it asked me to close "Dell Dock" at some point, but not this time around.

[PhilthePill]

Update. As mentioned above I attempted to reinstall the Client again on my Lap Top. First of all I closed the Dell Dock, and the installation progressed OK, however yet again I had to go through the process of creating an "empty" folder to set up the Home/CloudStation as it would not attach to the one I had been using before!! It appeared to all be working again, but when I tried to configure another user, and test it by adding some new Test Files and folders it did not detect them, and did not flag any activity on the icon, just showed green and up-to-date even though new files had been created!
Result, I have now uninstalled the CloudStation client for all users on all my machines as I feel this beta is not yet stable enough to be relied on for dependable syncing. I may return to CloudStation when a full production version is released but cannot devote time to constant fiddling and always having the doubt that it is not syncing correctly. So back to reliable Allway Sync set to auto mode for my all important Documents folder.

[Dad Man Walking]

Cloudstation has lots of stability problems...things seem to work fine for a while then something changes and it stops working properly. One issue I've had (more than once) is when my laptop fails to establish a connection with the NAS from a remote network (problem #1) and then when I get back to the LAN where the sync had worked fine, it's now broken(problem #2). Sometimes I hvae fixed that by simply reconnecting, other times I've had to reinstall the client app. Basically very flaky, not something I would rely on for mission critical requirements.

My current config has been stable for a while (but has not been fully stressed with lots of remote network connections. I have tried to eliminated two possible sources of problems:

1. I do note use QuickConnect...that has proven to be unreliable (lots of people have reported problems where the QuickConnect does not work). I use a URL that points to my LAN and I've opened up port 6690 on the router to let that traffic through.

2. I do not use the the Synology Dynamic DNS service (myname.synoogy.me) for the URL. It was regularly giving me "failed to establish connection and register the IP addres" errors, and after a while went silent on the alerts, then delisted the URL. I use DynDns with the router's service...it is much more reliable and, in theory, a much better way to keep the address listing current. (Side comment...the router knows what it's address is, and updates the DynDns service when that address changes. The NAS does not know what it's external address is, so it has to ping the Synology service daily to confirm. Not a good solution, especially when the registration service is flaky.)

Net-net...I think it is a bit misleading to call this product "Beta" because they don't have a beta program running with it. If it were Beta, we should be registered as beta users, be reporting bugs, be seeing and testing bug fixes, etc. That might happened with the first Beta of this software last year, but it's hardly what is going on now. I think that Synology just slapped a "beta" tag on it to let everybody know that it is not a very stable service.

[jltnol]

The NAS does not know what it's external address is,

Curious. Mine is behind a router, with a static LAN IP address, and can find the public IP address, as can all of the other computers on the network.... (http://www.getip.com)

[jltnol]

The NAS does not know what it's external address is,

Curious. Mine is behind a router, with a static LAN IP address, and can find the public IP address, as can all of the other computers on the network.... (http://www.getip.com)

[Dad Man Walking]

Let me restate it..the NAS does not need to know what the external IP address is to do its job. So when you are running the Synology DDNS service, it is pinging that service periodically, telling it "here I am, here's my external IP address." If that address changes, the DDNS service changes it's routing instructions to reflect the new address.

The problems I see with this are that (a) the Synology DDNS service has frequent problems re-registering the address for some users. It seems to have gotten better, but I still get an occasional error message. My DynDNS service running on the router has been bulletproof forever.

(b) The DynDNS service (or any other service that runs on the router) is also better because by definition the router knows its external address at all times. So if the IP address changes, the router knows that instantly and updates the DDNS service right away. So you should never be exposed to a blackout window between the time the IP address changes and the time the DDNS service is updated with the new address.

[RoBo]

I also experienced a "stopped" working using Cloud Station 1.1-2291. I'm using it though a SSH tunnel connected from a virtual interface within Win7_64b. Except from the normal benefits using this approach, this also makes that the client does not know if we use a local or a remote connection.
Maybe because I have many network-connection switches and sometimes have moments where there is no network connection possible over an active interface the CS stopped at some time.

It worked like a charm for a while, but at some point I experience that the icon remained on "synchronizing", without something happening.. also the list of recent updates was frozen.
Deeper investigation (sadly no Cloud Station logs for as far I could find) showed me that the client was trying to connect to the CS service, but the netstat on the Synology showed unestablished connections. On the CS Client I could detect that just about a second after the connection was tried to be established the session was closed again (always the same amount of bytes where transferred).

No time for more debugging now, so had to perform a manually triggered compare to get the data save...

P.s. I found some files in the .SynologyWorkingDirectory, but I guess this is normal since it probably stopped halfway an operation

[Hydrology]

I am seeing some problems with CS syncing. After 6 months of seeming to work ok, I am now finding some subdirectories are updating to all clients and some subdirectories are not updating. In all instances, the CS is connected to the DS and the little green check mark says that everything is up to date, but they are not. Often with two subdirectories at the same tree level, one will sync with the DS and the other one wont sync, but the green check mark is on both directories! This even occurs with clients that are connected over the internal LAN. And, different clients have different subdirectories that wont sync even weeks after the files were updated. It's total chaos.