Introduce yourself here

[adam75south]

Adam, 31
United States, Texas
I.T. Guy full time and part time photographer.

Bought a DS109 about two years ago. Was supposed to be just a NAS for backing up my Lightroom catalogs til I found the download station and media server. Next thing I know, I've got myself a real life home server and I was hooked.

Recently, I decided I wanted some RAID storage and the Drobo caught my eye. Had full intentions of getting one and ended up getting a DS411 instead...and man I'm glad I did. Have had the 411 for a couple of weeks now. It's awesome. I've been through DSM4.0 and back to 3.2 because of transfer speeds. Can't wait for the final release though. It was pretty cool.

Hobbies. Poker. I'm a decent live poker player. I win, just not enough to justify trying it full time. Photography. I shoot weddings and some fashion stuff part time. Again, I don't make enough to justify doing it full time.

[indelible]

hi all, i just got a ds212j for personal use. i'll be using it mainly to stream tv shows and movies. i've lately become addicted to several tv series so the NAS will serve me greatly. I might not have actually needed the NAS since i have wdtv live and an htpc, but so far it has been a good network learning experience. i'm just afraid 2 drive bays isnt enough, so i'm still considering the HP N40L while i can still return this system.

[axel112]

Hi there!

Just bought a Synology ds110j to replace my Linksys NSLU2 which was running Debian Lenny. I will be using my synology for backups and media streaming.

Take care! /axel112

[kezg]

Hi all i'm Kerry, just setup the 1812+ for home use, first time nas'er.
Setup with 8x 3Tb in SHR - 1 spare drive. gives me around 18Tb of storage.

I'm keeping an open mind but so far Im definately NOT LOVING the experience, a little too non user friendly - but staying open till i really know how to use it...

I dont like how you practically have to be a sys admin to know how to use it but good to learn this stuff. I just want to be able to setup a bunch of folders and share across windows network - you'd think it'll be easy peesy!

Slower then i'd hoped for also but is ok.

Anyway that's my first impression, probably just my inexperience thats holding it back a bit, will re-evaluate my opinion of it when I actually know what im doing.

Nice to meet you,
Kerry.

[alex001]

Hi Guys,I amalex001.
I am from Canada.I am new here.Sometimes I face some issues, so its great to have this type of forum. I hope, we will have a great time in discussions and we will gain something new.

[dreamtime]

Hello
My name is Henrik and I'm from Denmark
I have a DS209 1tb disk

[peterbon]

Hi Kerry,

My name is Peter. I am also new to NAS stuff. I got the DS 1511 about 3 months ago. You have a (by my standards) huge amount of space, that is great! It does seem sometimes like you have to be a SysAdmin (I am not, just a retired teacher-photographer) to make good use of Synology devices. There are certainly a lot of ways to go. And no-one seems to write or talk about it much from a "user" standpoint. But I am gradually learning, and the forums are often helpful and always entertaining.

I got NAS mainly for backup and to expand my storage. How about you?

[f4brice]

Hello.

Fabrice, 37 years old, living in France.
I'm software engineer in computer science, working in transportation domain.
My NAS is a DS212+ with 2 x 2 TB Seagate disks.
It's used as main data storage, photo sharing with family and friends, media source for TV, ...

I registered this forum because I think a ticket (strange PhotoStation behavior) should be submitted to Synology support team.

[Otto2]

Hi, my name is Mick and I live in Lincolnshire, England.
I am a true novice in the world of NAS, I am here to learn.
Synology products have come to my notice as a quality product(plus they look good).
Photography is my main hobby, and my Aperture library is growing with great speed. I am looking into adding a NAS to be used as the storage for this and my iTunes.
My initial thoughts are to get a DS212J with 2 x 2TB.
I feel optimistic that this forum will help, fingers crossed

[uwave]

Uwave swapped out our power hungry server for distributed pcs tied together with a gig-e network on a transcend managed gig-e switch. We have 4 buildings tied w/ microwave links runnig 10gbps on the microwave channel, but just 1gpbs cat5e cables inside to maintain compatibility with the pcs, net printers, designjet plotters, etc.

Pretty much at the heart of this is - yea you guessed it - our synology server. It watches our cameras and logs traffic. It moves data to/from remote pcs, runs our vpn when we are offsite, has 15 T1 lines attached and inverse muxed into a single 100 mbps link. We use android phones and their lapdock solutionon 4g (31mbps down / 20 mbps up) to link home - the lapdock lets us drop any cellphone into it and have a 1080x1920 display w/ stereo speakers (amped) and touchpad and keyboard. We prefer to use wireless keyboards, so there is a usb dongle on our lapdock with a remote mouse/keyboard made by Microsoft of all companies - works well on the droid bionic / droid 4 phones on the road. Speaking of apps, we found a new app that crosses the android/iphone boarder and gives you your own free, private nextel/iden network - zello walkie talkie (think jello with a z) - they are tied to a voip pc app (no mac support yet) called loudtalks.com - it ties your pc to your handheld talk groups using the f7 key. This allows a pc to be a dispatch system - you talk into it signed into a talkgroup that has all pcs enrolled into it (each pc must subscribe to prevent spam) . Press f7 and hold it down and talk - all pcs in your talkgroup hear your speach. Over 5 users and you pay a trivial monthly fee - best news is their audio codec is better than cellular and the carriers 4g data signal reaches into places where 3g does not reach, so its possible to send walkie talkie signals into remote corners of the service area.

Now the bad part.

We've got 2 volumes defined with all our contracts, blueprints, data, etc on a raid 5 system - one is on the initial 5x2tb or 10tb disk on the 1010+ - the second volume is kept on the sidecar. Both arrays have their power cords duct-taped into their sources, and are run to an APC ups with 48VDC x 100AH power batteries which will run the microwave tranceivers and associated network hardware - it runs for up to a few hours to start our genset that backs it up. I do not recommend putting laser printers on the backups - ours is a 3KW backup and the fuser heater in the laserjet can seem like a power glitch on the UPS.

We are interested in migrating to DSM4.0 - however we do not have confidence that we may loose data in the transfer. This is an issue. I'm looking for people with simple DS1010+ servers that got migrated from DSM3.2 to dsm 4.0 with a sidecar for 10 drives (we are using 2TB drives) - the risks - the pitfalls - the downtime - and the features you gain moving to dsm40 - does it work with all the dsfile apps on handhelds which we get ALOT of use out of for both iphone and android handhelds. None of our volumes are over 50% full of data, but some are getting close at 47% so I figure the time is right to migrate.

Finally we want to install BIND and a proxy cache server on the web like SQUID on our DSM4.0 based 1010+. The reason is alot of viruses are comming in on advertising with buffer overflow attacks. Norton catches them on the pc, but they fly right through all the firwalls. There is a neat trick that speeds up page loads. Most internet pages have 4 ads - 2 on top 2 on the side. They come from servers like www4.3rdpartyadsgalore.com (which got hacked into by a script kiddie age 17 and face full of acne to send out ads w/ buffer overflow.)

What you do in phase one of operation "ADSTOP" is load your caching name server /etc/hosts file with a list of all ad servers (google maintains this list) and instead of returning their actual IP address you return 128.0.0.1 from /etc/hosts. Because you don't have a page on your localhost (128.0.0.1 is YOUR pc's loopback address) the 404 not found or error no server here loads in 1-2 miliseconds instead of the 3-4 seconds the overtaxed ad servers take to respond with their virus or non-virus ad.

The second half of operation "ADSTOP" is running a private squid proxy server on the dsm box with a gigabyte network cache flushed every 24 hours and told not to cache frequently changing sites like quote.com, schwab.com, ameritrade.com - all those are passed on direct, and https rides on port 443 separate so it never sees squid - EVER. Squid keeps things like the google logo for the day for 24 hours and sends it to the pc at 2 gbps (dual links to the 10gbps microwave channel).

BIND kills the adserver from ever sending ads to pcs using dsm's bind dns resolver. squid speeds up page loads to the double link (2 each 1gpbs ties bonded to the transcend gigabit managed switch). Provided /etc/hosts is kept up to date with all adservers it prevents any request going through the dsm system running bind from ever getting a real IP address for an adserver.

This may sound like alot of work but our dsm3.2 system is on the public net (passwords are over 19 characters in length and admin/administrator are locked out so we have hidden accounts for admin - part of our security and the reason the system log shows so many hack attacks every day)

If anyone else has moved their ds1010 plus to dsm 4.0 without loosing data in raid5 x 2 volumes (sidecar + main disk array) please help. I can be reached after 2pm at area code four zero eight two siz one four thousand - wait for answer - then enter extension four thousand nine 4 - 0 - 0 - 9 on your keypad. it will transfer you to my desk phone and we can discuss options.

The dsm1010+ has been running for a couple years now and has serviced us reliably the entire time. I'm actively searching other 1010+ / dsm3.2 -> 4.0 migrators and to hear their experience - also people who run bind and / or squid on their NAS so I can learn from experiences of other people. Name is Everett as in the city in washington, Basham as in w. Ralph Basham former director of the secret service. website is www dot uwave dot com and is our remote entry point for employees at home.

Thanks for your time and collaberation. Much appreciated and may we all come out ahead.

EFB

[schmouff]

Hi,

My name is Laurent, i live in Grenoble, France.
I've just bought 2 Synology DS212J, one for my girlfriend, then one for me because a was jealous

Regards
Laurent

[fliquid]

Hey,

My name's Paul. Live near Southampton in the UK.

Just got my DS212J today - hopefully will be visiting the forums more to read/learn all about the extra functionalities

[AlanF]

Hi I'm Al

We run a backup service, I look after over 100 Synology servers mainly small 110j 210+ some 410+ and a few 1512+ We run 350TB of storage on Synology, I'm based in Cape Town South Africa.

Al

[randommagic]

Hi All,

I have a DS412+ with 8TB of storage. First time using Synology products but I am pretty happy with it.
Only had it a week but managed to set up some pretty decent software on it.
Media Server pushing my movies straight to the TV.
Cloud Station for those files on the go.
Subsonic for all my music.
Transmission for.. well you know what its for.
VPN Server.
Headphones.
DDNS Updater to help with keeping my remote DNS account active.
Couchpotato
SABnzBD

Download Station was my first try at using torrents but the lack of a block list was my first reason for changing that.

Was expecting things to be more difficult but its all been pretty straight forward for most of what I want to do.

At some point I will get around to having it working with Vmware using iSCSI LUNS but for the moment I don't have time.

I work as an IT manager and I'm used to supporting server environments running Windows / Redhat / Vmware so hopefully I should be able to help out in the forums from time to time.

[247alan]

Hey there.

I'm Alan, and I've got a DS410. I love it.