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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

I bought a SynologyNAS and I have regretted already 3-4 times. Apart from the software made available from the community, there is very little one can do with this thing.

Using LE to apply SSL to services? Complicated. Non standard paths, custom distro, everything hidden (you can’t figure out where to place the ssl cert of how to restart the service, etc). Of course you will figure it out if you spent 50 hours… but why?

Don’t get me started with the old rsync version, lack of midnight commander and/or other utils.

I should have gone with something that runs proper Linux or BSD.

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Unless you know what you are walking into ahead of time I would not recommend Synology to someone who wants to host a bunch of stuff and also wants a NAS. I don’t touch any of the container/apps stuff on my Synology(s), they are simply file servers for my application server. For this purpose, I find Synology rock solid and I’ve been very happy with them.

That said, I’ll probably try out the UniFi NAS offerings in the near future. I believe Synology has semi-walked-back its draconian hard drive policy but I don’t trust them to not try that again later. And because I only use my Synology as a NAS I can switch to something else relatively easily, as long as I can mount it on my app server, I’m golden.

You wanted a server and complain NAS is not just a server.

More like, user wanted an open operating system but chose a proprietary one.

NAS is the primary function. But yes, I want full linux server that I can decide what to install and which protocol to use to upload and/or download files.

Why not just leave the NAS to be a NAS and get a separate server? You're probably better off not trying to overload the NAS to be everything.

Can you provide some details about this overloading concept?

Why do I want two things when I can have one? Newer nases with n100 or similar are pretty powerful for the cost/package.

is there a reason you didn’t consider one of the uGreen NAS’s?

(Copied from an earlier comment of mine)

There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them: https://forum.doozan.com/list.php

please don't do this to your synology

leave it to serve files and iscsi. it's very good at it

if you leave it alone, no extra software, it will basically be completely stable. it's really impressive

Second this, just use it for files, it’s great for it. 10+ years uptime if you leave it alone.

I'm so happy I didn't buy a NAS, Synology or not. I think a proper computer running Linux gives me so much more flexibility.

that's still a NAS.

I bought Synology RS217 for $100 last year and it's the best tech purchase I made in years. The software it comes with is the best web interface I experienced in years. The simplicity, stability and attention to detail reminds me of old macs. I have macmini as application server and did not expect to use Synology for anything but file storage / replication. However it comes with a great torrent client that I use all the time now. We also use Synology Office instead of google docs now. It exceeded all my expectations and when it dies, I will immediately buy one of the new rack stations they offer.

You can run a container on Synology and install your custom services, tools there. At least that is what I do. For custom kernel modules you still need a Synology package for something like Wireguard.

If you have OPNSense, it has an ACME plugin with Synology action. I use that to automatically renew and push a cert to the NAS.

That said, since I like to tinker, Synology feels a bit restricted, indeed. Although there is some value in a stable core system (like these immutable distros from Fedora Atomic).

The extremely old kernel on Synology makes it hard or impossible to run some containers.

I have a fairly recent DS920+ and never had issues with containers - I have probably 10+ containers on it - grafana, victoriametrics/logs, jellyfin, immich with ML, my custom ubuntu toolboxes for net, media, ffmpeg builds, gluetun for vpn, homeassistant, wallabag,...

Edit: I just checked Grafana and cadvisor reports 23 containers.

Edit2: 4.4.302+ (2022) is my kernel version, there might be specific tools that require more recent kernels, of course, but I was so far lucky enough to not run into those.

While gluetun works great, there are other implementations of wireguard that fail without the kernel modules. I've also ran into issues from containers wanting the kernel modules for iptables-nft but Synology only has legacy iptables.

I belive even for gluetun I had to add the WG kernel module. I think I used this to compile it for myself https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard

I know there are userspace implementations, but can't remember the specifics rn and don't have my notes with me.

> kernel modules for iptables-nft

I think you meant nftables. The iptables-nft package is meant to provide iptables interface for nftables for code that still expects that, afaik. I didn't run into that issue yet (knock-knock). According to docs nftables is available since kernel 3.13, so in theory it might be possible to build the modules for Synology.

However, I don't think I will be buying another Synology in the future, mainly because of other issues like they restricting what RAM I can use or what I want to use the M2 slots for, or their recent experiment with trying to push their own drives only, etc. I might give TrueNAS a try if I am not bored enough to just build one on top of a general purpose OS...

I had to look it up and I think it was a mix of user error and a bad container. At one point I had been trying to use the nicolaka/netshoot container as a sidecar to troubleshoot iptables on another container and it is/was(?) missing the iptables-legacy package and unable to interact with the first containers iptables.

As great as containerization is, having the right kernel modules available goes a long way and I probably wouldn't have run into trouble like that if the first container hadn't fallen back to iptables because nftables was unavailable.

All of these NAS OSs that include docker work great for the most popular containers, but once you get into the more complex ones strange quirks start poping up.

> Using LE to apply SSL to services? Complicated.

https://github.com/JessThrysoee/synology-letsencrypt

> there is very little one can do with this thing.

It has a VMM and Docker. Entware / opkg exist for it. There's very little that can't be done, but expecting to use an appliance that happens to be Linux-based as a generic Linux server is going to lead to challenges. Be it Synology, TrueNAS, or anything else.

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