I’ve been using various Synology NAS devices for many years now, and they’re great. Well, almost. There are a few rough spots that don’t thrill me. These consumer-grade devices are designed to be difficult to break by people who know little about computers. This approach also annoys the living daylights out of people who do know a thing or two about network-attached storage.
Problem number one: manual configurations added via CLI disappear after reboot. I am talking about entries added to /etc/fstab, /etc/exports, and so on. The only viable option here is to recreate your changes after the system reboots. In other words, you need to create a script that runs at startup.
For example, I added the following line to /etc/fstab that disappears after every reboot:
nas07.jedi.local:/downloads /mnt/nas07/downloads nfs defaults,bg,rsize=65536,wsize=16384 0 0
Very annoying. Yes, I can fiddle with the Web UI and mount this share the “right way,” but who has the time for this nonsense? A far better solution is to create a file called /etc/.fstab and put your additions there. Then you would need to create a startup script that will append these lines to the actual /etc/fstab every time the system boots.
cat << EOF > /usr/local/etc/rc.d/Sfstab.sh
#!/bin/sh
cat /etc/fstab /etc/.fstab > /tmp/fstab_tmp
awk '/^ *$/ { delete x; }; !x[$0]++' /tmp/fstab_tmp > /etc/fstab
/bin/rm -f /tmp/fstab_tmp
mount -a
EOF
chmod 755 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/Sfstab.sh
You can use the startup script method to make any other change to your system that otherwise would not survive a reboot.
Problem number two: the Samba server refuses to follow symbolic links. This one is actually a “security feature.” There are reasons why disallowing soft links may be a good idea, but I don’t care.
The config file for Samba is /etc/samba/smb.conf and you would need to add a few lines to the [global] section of this file.
allow insecure wide links = yes follow symlinks = yes wide links = yes unix extensions = no
Once this is done, you will need to restart the SMB service:
/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.sysv/S80samba.sh restart
The change to /etc/samba/smb.conf should still be there after you reboot the system. However, if that file somehow disappears or gets corrupted, the SMB service script will copy the default version from here: /etc.defaults/samba/smb.conf
I suggest you do not modify this default file, but instead do this:
/bin/cp -p /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/.smb.conf
Problem number three: standard Linux CLI utilities are missing. I should’ve started with this one, but here we are. The solution here is to add the Community Package Hub to your Synology Package Center:
- Open Synology Package Center → Settings → Package Sources → Add
- Add the source name CPHub and location http://www.cphub.net
- Close Settings and click Community → Easy Bootstrap Installer → Install
- Now, if you log out and log back in, you should have the
/opt/bin/ipkgutility.
I suggest you now go ahead and install these tools:
ipkg update; ipkg install lsof util-linux moreutils psmisc
Experienced Unix/Linux System Administrator with 20-year background in Systems Analysis, Problem Resolution and Engineering Application Support in a large distributed Unix and Windows server environment. Strong problem determination skills. Good knowledge of networking, remote diagnostic techniques, firewalls and network security. Extensive experience with engineering application and database servers, high-availability systems, high-performance computing clusters, and process automation.
