I guess I'm never quite satisfied...I want NAS setups that are reliable, draw as close to no power as possible, and since they're on and drawing power, maybe can do some other useful stuff with their idle cycles. If your NAS has any performance to speak of...it's going to have idle cycles a lot of the time. It's going to need them pushing stuff at wire speed, but then there's the other 23+ hours in a day.
I got unhappy with that synology for various reasons - they purport to support that "other stuff" but it's a pretty big fail unless you want to magically become expert in their stripped down and heavily modified (so you can't break it - or fix it either) linux. And they really want you to use DDNS, be online...kinda IoT "we want to be your man in the middle" vibe. That's a nope. Raid isn't really the answer to reliability in my use-case and takes forever to build or scrub. What if their box fails? Their custom raid setup is now useless bits I can't recover, and RAID never did protect from fat finger.
Finally there's cheap hardware out there that kinda fits the bill for what I want. A little more power than a Raspberry pi, but FAST. This would be the Odroid HC series. 1 Gb ethernet, built in SATA, nice package with heatsink (passive)...and compatible with the Odroid XU4, which I have, and which is a bonus to getting set up.
Here's the thing: https://www.hardkernel.com/main/product ... 1505170472
Amazon has these too, at a somewhat higher price (but shipping..). It's a nifty little box. 8 cores, 2 gB ram, 2 gHz clock...fast.
Now, you can in fact just download OpenMediaVault and put it on an SD card, set it up like this (it's picky about doing things in order) and be done if you want basically the same stuff as a synology but more flexible - a more or less pure NAS. These guys also have snarky support forums (you're holding it wrong)...the stuff works (and I'm using one out of my 4 setups), but...totally dedicated to the one thing. Which is fine if you just want the one thing. They did a decent job if you don't get any of their add-ons or plugins, which tend towards flaky. They even do a decent remapping of things such that most of the writing to the SD card instead goes to a ramdisk. So, not super bad, just not quite what I want here. In theory you can run scripts on these, from a cron job...I haven't tried that yet, and am not sure how you'd debug those.
You might want to look at this link, which I should have posted earlier in this thread, before doing the rest, but hey...I'm human. viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1111&p=6527#p6527
So....why not just put a real linux on one, and have it your way all the way? That's what I've been up to, and it's looking good. I got a distro for arm and odroid (which even has a kind of retarded Mate desktop) and got that going on an XU4 - which has niceties like, you know, a video output...but as soon as I got xtightvnc and pals going there, jumped to the HC2 hardware and did the rest headless. Geting xtightvnc to reliably start once and only once...in the presence of systemd, is kind of a trick, and I'd never have managed without a gui while setting it up. It's only a different technique than anything else on linux, ever...
And in this thread, I'm going to detail how I did, what I did, with tips and links so you could too. This all came out really nice.
I have them:
Full linux with desktop remote via VNC (SSH works too).
MySQL (actually Mariadb but we won't quibble)
phpbbBB - yep, the same software that runs this board
phpMyAdmin - for the database
Nginx - nice web server, with (obviously) fastcgi for php - and for perl, which was a little trickier (I have a script somewhere)
And some add ons I thought were cool. For example, I'm not using phpbb here for a grocery list (but it would fit) - I'm using it to back up my work, my thoughts, do useful things in the middle of the night (down and uploads come to mind, as well as "layered deep backup between NAS instances".
So the limitations of phpBB started to chafe - it has some limits, which you can change up to the limits php itself has - and no, changing the .ini doesn't fix it - on handling huge files (like a backup of the NAS distro I built). So...workarounds for things like that.
Of course, since there was one heck of a lot of tweaking to do here (no, not the popular usage, I don't do drugs) - I also added my usual tools my muscle memory works well with.
Example - why does every rev of every distro seem to have to rewrite and rename the basic text editor, putting the functions in a different place where they work a little differently? Crap on that - I use the "obsolete since no one's fixing what ain't broken anymore" Gedit. One example of many, I'll get into that further down-thread. YMMV as always, the point of this exercise is to have it YOUR way (nope, not fast food either), whatever way that is.
I understand why people like Synology or OpenMediaVault do things the way they do - reduce the adjustments and options, and there are fewer ways for lusers to break it - no knobs, no maladjustment, just hold it right and cram yourself into that mold. Cuts support way down. Since with my user hat on, their suport is useless anyway, why not have no support but my own - but get what I want?
This is long for one post, and sadly, almost info free. I'll be putting the rest down-thread.
Teaser - here's the desktop of one of them with the other shares mounted on it too (that deep multi location backup enabler I mentioned), the Remmina viewer, and the webmin webpage it emits (among several others, but only one screen in a screenshot, right?).
So, something to do with all those 4tB disks I took out of the synology (after backing it up, of course).