[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Edward O. Holcroft]

I have used several Synology boxes over the years and they have treated me
well, by and large. I've various models ranging from simple RAID 1 to a
pretty decent rack mount 40TB unit.

The built in apps are also cool and provide some very easy ways to do stuff
like sync to S3 and so on. They also seem pretty good about releasing
security updates. Raj gave a pretty good overview of some of the plus
points. I can tell you though that having replaced and upgraded drives in
FreeNAS it is very, very simple. The drive switching methodology should
really not be a deciding factor between FreeNAS and Synology.

These Synology units have not (totally) failed on me over several years now
and do the job they were put in place to do (basic file serving and
archival in a Windows desktop environment). I also have one that I use for
simple config file backups with scp.

However:
1. I had the File manager fail on my on a unit (twice, about a year apart)
due to a bad update. This locked me out of managing my own files. OK, so
shit happens, but the ONLY way I could get this resolved was through
Synology support who did some magic remotely (I had to open ssh to their IP
on my firewall the first time, but the second time on a newer DSM version
all I had to do was enable "Remote Support" ). Kudos to Synology support
who fixed it in no time on a device that was well out of warranty. BUT this
sort of thing leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth. The idea of
being handcuffed to a vendor for their secret sauce when things go wrong is
not the way I like to do things.
2. One of their platform updates changed the security so that you can no no
longer ssh in as root. It also changed (read: broke) the way sudo works.
This broke one of my backup schemes. Well I made a few changes and I was
back in action. BUT, once again this is proprietary thinking stuck on top
of an open platform. Maybe root ssh is a bad idea. But I'll decide whether
I have strong or weak security protocols in place, thank you very much, not
the vendor.
3. The only real technical issue I have with Synology is that they do not
support FDE (maybe this has changed but the units I have do not). This was
very surprising to me. If you use their soft encryption then you run into
140 character filename length limits which would never work for the
ridiculous ways our people name their files.

This kind of handcuffing worries me and to my way of thinking the
convenience of Synology is too great a price to pay for being told how to
use the system and potentially being screwed when something goes really
wrong. I for one would much rather deal with the challenge of finding the
right case and power supply than being dictated to in a way that feels way
too "propriety" for my liking. Beware that root access to Synology is not
like root access to your Linux box ... there is stuff you cannot get to on
Synology.

So my answer, having tried Synology is, roll your own. My next NAS box will
almost certainly be FreeNAS which I have been testing for about a year now
as it looks like everything I need in a NAS without the handcuffs.

ed



On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 3:26 PM Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
> next year at home.  One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
> NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
> video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
> area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.
>
> Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
> QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
> whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
> motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.
>
>
>
> One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
> EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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