A pain in my NAS. :(

[KuJoe]

My Synology NAS (DS110j) started e-mailing me about SMART errors in my single 1TB drive the other day and so I hooked up a USB drive to it and started backing up all of my data. Once all of my data was safe I ignored it and figured I'd wait for the drive to die before ordering a new one. Yesterday I tried connecting to my NAS to stream music and found that the network shares weren't working, it turns out samba wasn't running and won't start for some reason. I searched the logs to no avail and after digging deeper I see a lot of services aren't starting and I can only assume isn't memory related since I only have about 10MB free and a lot of swapping. I tried offloading as many services I could to my RPi2 but I run too many things on my NAS that I can't move off so it looks like the NAS is being replaced before the drive dies.

I ordered one of Synology's new "BeyondCloud" NAS's (BC115j) which comes with a 2TB drive for close to what the DS110j + 1TB drive cost years ago. I considered getting a DS115j and buying the drive separate but all reviews say the BC115j is optimized by Synology and performs better than the DS115j with an equivalent drive in it and the price difference wasn't that big.

Once the new NAS is online and everything is migrated over I'll probably grab a 4TB drive, rebuild the DS110j and place it in a data center for backup/NFS storage.

NOTE: I was bored so I decided to share this lovely story with you all. There's no real point to this thread other than a tale about a tired old Synology NAS. I know, I really should start writing in my blog to keep this kind of stuff off this kind of forum.

 

[MartinD]

Wouldn't you be better off buying a NAS with multiple drives for the sake of redundancy and peace of mind?

I've got an older Netgear with 4 drives for that very reason. Everything of value is stored on there so I need to make sure in so far is possible, that the data remains intact and safe from failure.

Single drive NAS is a baaddd idea!

Picture the scene.

It's been a long, hard week. You've decided to kick it back with the wife on Friday night, maybe relive one of those youthful Friday nights in front of the TV from days gone by. Barry White's oozing from the hifi, the wine has been opened and you're getting ready to decide which movie to watch, something that'll get you in the mood.

Unfortunately, the drive in the NAS has failed so there's no movies to be watched.

You're relegated to the bathroom with your favourite sock and your wife starts on the ironing instead.

All because of a poor NAS setup!

 

[KuJoe]

@MartinD all of my important data is replicated to 3 different locations (1 local, 2 remote) in real time and all of my files that don't change (media, ISOs, archives, etc...) are backed up each day to a local disk and a remote VPS. Once I have the BC115j then I'll be able to setup the DS110j as a slave so all data written to the BC115j will be replicated in real time to the off-site DS110j.

Basically any data that I can't afford to lose and I need right this second I have many backups of without needing to even move cables or login to anything. Any data I might need to access within an hour or two is available to me locally on different devices.

 

[drmike]

The NAS stuff with multiple drives is pretty much a recipe for future fail also.  Single vendor drives, all same wear cycles, etc.  Been there, failed.

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I am a bit surprised about NAS offerings these days and pokey throughput still... Way more features packed in NAS today but speed still slagging.

 

[MartinD]

The NAS stuff with multiple drives is pretty much a recipe for future fail also.  Single vendor drives, all same wear cycles, etc.  Been there, failed.

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I am a bit surprised about NAS offerings these days and pokey throughput still... Way more features packed in NAS today but speed still slagging.

I'd agree however I'd hope no-one's stupid enough to be running multiple drive setups (in any situation) with same vendor/model hardware.

 

[drmike]

I'd agree however I'd hope no-one's stupid enough to be running multiple drive setups (in any situation) with same vendor/model hardware.

Happens all the time and lots of guys swear by such.  Place that order for a case of new drives and future fails get more predictable.

In corporate settings been fan of holding mixed inventory and bringing new gear up with inventory mix.  Leased gear and lots of premium manufacturers frown about such, but I am not telling them.   Drives are disposable commodity in a server unless buying fancy high end SAN solutions or direct attached SSD exotics.   Then drive fails become moot since real SANs are so costly and warranty and such are built in costs.

In the market for a small NAS solution (4 drives), so timely conversation.   Good to see things working for guys here.

 

[MartinD]

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra4.


Genuinely one of the best bits of tech kit I've ever had.

 

[KuJoe]

Bah! Here I go thinking my NAS is being overloaded only to find it was a bug in the update last month and they fixed it in this morning's release.

 

[clarity]

Bah! Here I go thinking my NAS is being overloaded only to find it was a bug in the update last month and they fixed it in this morning's release.

Now, you have an extra! To be honest, that sucks. Are you going to cancel your other order?

 

[KuJoe]

Now, you have an extra! To be honest, that sucks. Are you going to cancel your other order?

It's already shipped so I'll still stick with my original plan of migrating all of my data over to my new one and I'll colocate my old one.

 

[drmike]

Sad, but software as a bug  Common issue these days of breaking release and depending on the community and their knowledge level such fubars can go on a very very long time.

Update to address inferred security aspects as a respectable tech, ugly downside of mass breakage.  Too common.  I use to think it was bad QA testing.  These day I think it's being done intentionally.

 

[KuJoe]

The bug occurred because I like to tinker with the command line. Had I stuck to the GUI as recommended I wouldn't have had an issue I'm sure (especially with me installing community software to replace the system's own software).


Luckily the latest update fixed my mistake for me by rebuilding the things I broke (but weren't broken until last week for some reason).

 

[drmike]

The bug occurred because I like to tinker with the command line. Had I stuck to the GUI as recommended I wouldn't have had an issue I'm sure (especially with me installing community software to replace the system's own software).


Luckily the latest update fixed my mistake for me by rebuilding the things I broke (but weren't broken until last week for some reason).

CLI should never go breaking something like such.... I live CLI also and well, disappointed with a lot of gear because of GUI only limitations.  GUI should be nothing more than software over API where such API is available to anything with credentials that you can fashion a program to henpeck at.

Interesting aspect the CLI topic is for NAS devices.  In industry reviews of gear there is ever little to no mention of CLI.  

 

[KuJoe]

Synology's software is basically a really stripped down linux OS and they try to prevent root access to prevent people from breaking things like I did. And yes, CLI will definitely break something if you overwrite the system software with hacked together community software.