Indeed.
I started with synology out of desire to get a nas that “just works” so I don’t have to report bugs, find workarounds, sit on forums, and becoming an expert on its internals. I did not mind paying extra for that luxury, and synology positioned itself like Apple of NASes – eye candy, polished, fabulous experience.
I ended up reporting bugs, finding workarounds, sitting on forums, and becoming an expert on its internals.
I did not believe the claims that it will replace Dropbox, GoogleDocs, Photos, and drive existing companies out of business by being awesome at doing all that, but the reality turned out to be much grimmer – nothing works outside of default settings pretty much. Bug reports were accepted (before they switched to web based support actual engineers would reply via email) but never acted upon. Bugs were everywhere – from the CloudStation and HyperBackup to networking and static routes persistence.
I accepted that I was duped by this extra free functionality and I should probably use the machine as just NAS. I did not pay for all those free apps, so I’ll pretend they are no there.
But as a NAS it did not work either. Besides the constant samba issue sand NVME timeouts resetting the NAS (which they “fixed” by rebranding SSD sticks and lowering throughput artificially to avoid running out of free cells) to glaring security bugs in services like ssh. What?! “secret password” was discovered long ago and fixed, but the sftp server behavior was never standard, – many backup programs have dedicated sections describing workarounds for synology sftp targets… which made me think – how much did they manage to mangle OpenSSH?
So I pulled up their sources, which they had to release back according to the license, and they did, they are on source forge. I open OpenSSH authentication path expecting to see synology changes that they released back to the public, right. But what do I see there?
I see calls into an opaque synology shim layer, sources of which they did not have to and did not release.
Let it sink in: They have patched authentication path in OpenSSH by inserting calls into their proprietary, closed source, shim layer.
Ever heard of TiVo? The term “Tivoization”? It’s just like that – but worse.
So, if you expose synology SSH server to the interwebs – oh well.
They literary used their next door neighbor ADATA sticks, and then switch to another next door neighbor. They literary source the cheapest ram they can find, slap the sticker, and now it costs its weight in gold. And people pay it. Why!!! I sold the 4GB stick it came with on ebay and it paid for 16GB upgrade. They are clearly preying on ignorant, and it’s disgusting.
And the plus series – why DS920+ and DS1619+ are in the same lineup if not to confuse consumers?
I had this exact conversation on Reddit years ago, and a dude replied that he is Synology authorized service provider, and is completely confused by sinology branding of these models. What do you expect from end users?
Yea my 4 synology NASes all ended up there too…
Yep. They are marketing company. This rebranding business is to cover up their mishaps. The “cache SSDs” that they sell at a huge markup — they are cheap TLC SSDs or worse, with throttled throughout and huge overprovisooning, so that when you actually use them as cache, firmware has fewer changes to end up scrambling for free cells in the middle of write, thus avoiding NVME timeout which they still haven’t fixed, inspire of debugging in on my personal nas remotely for a month, and asking me to send the SSDs to them to Taiwan… the outcome of that was – lets rebrand cheap sticks to workaround our issue while making more money.
The degree of contempt I feel towards this company is immeasurable and indescribable. I feel they personally betrayed my trust and I just wasted time reproducing bugs and reporting them in good faith, foolish me.
Now (5 years ago) I moved to TrueNAS and it has been smooth sailing since. Who knew that Time Machine actually works extremely well if samba is configured correctly and is built from a branch not mangled by a horde of underpaid interns.