Synology

Dynamic DNS, or DDNS, is an easy way to maintain an up-to-date address on the internet, even if you do not have a static IP address from your ISP. Synology DSM has the capability to act as a DDNS server, which can automatically update the IP address of a custom google domain name and most other domain registrars. This tutorial covers how to use a Synology NAS to automatically update a domain name registered with google with Synology’s DDNS server. Overview Having a constant address on the internet that leads back to your home network is a critical component for...

When using a RAID / SHR on Synology NAS, you do not have to fill all of your drive bays at the same time. Instead you can buy something like a DS1819+ and start out with just as many drives as you need. Then once you start running out of storage space, you can simply expand the RAID pool on your Synology NAS by adding additional drives to your RAID pool. In this tutorial we are going to cover how to expand a RAID Pool on Synology NAS by adding an additional drive to it, as well some important things...

This tutorial will demonstrate how to set a hostname on your Synology NAS. A hostname is a unique name that you can set to your NAS, which you can use in place of an IP address on your local network. This can save you a ton of headache by giving your device an easy-to-remember name, and by allowing you have a consistent address on your network without having to set a static IP address. Overview Setting a hostname on your Synology NAS is easy, and it allows you to access your NAS without entering an IP address. For example, the...

Setting up a Static IP Address on Synology allows for your NAS to stay at same IP address on your network. This alleviates the headache of having to find the new IP address of your NAS every time it reboots when you want to connect to it from your computer. Background: There are two different ways to get a static IP address from your router: either through the NAS itself or using DHCP reservations. This tutorial will show you how to do the setup through the NAS itself. DHCP reservations are setup via your router and will be the subject...

Overtime the free space on you hard drives can get spread out on the physical drive, slowing performance. In order to combat this you should defragment your hard drives on a simi-regular basis. This tutorial will cover how to defragment a hard drive array on Synology NAS. Overview Hard drive fragmentation is caused by the fact that when you delete something on a hard drive, it does not actually write over the data that was there. Instead the drive essentially forgets that data was ever stored there. This allows the data in this location to be overwritten the next time...

Synology is a powerful home NAS with terabytes of storage available. This tutorial will show you how to connect your Mac directly to your NAS, which allows you to access this additional storage directly from Finder. This process is simple and can work over either a wired ethernet connection or even wifi, though you will get better performance over a wired connection. There are three different ways to connect your Mac to your Synology NAS: SMB, AFS, and NFS. Between these three options I would recommend SMB, as AFP is depreciated, and NFS is slow and more difficult to setup....

Overview Link Aggregation allows you to combine multiple 1GbE connections to get higher performance when multiple devices are connecting at the same time. One important thing to note: You cannot use Link Aggregation to gain a speed advantage when only one device is connected. Meaning you cannot use 4, 1GbE ports to get a faster than 125MB/s read/write on a large file transfer. Instead you can get up to 4 devices all getting the full 1GbE speeds. This is the primary reason why most Synology models come with at least two ports. This not only allows for higher multi-user performance...

SSH Keys on Synology NAS SSH keys are a great way to securely login to your NAS without requiring password authentication! In this tutorial we are going to cover setting up SSH Keys on Synology NAS from DSM. This will work with both MAC and PC (and linux of course). Configure Settings First, log in to DSM. Open your Control Panel. Under Advanced Mode, go to Terminal and SNMP and click Enable SSH Service. Leave on Port 22 and click Apply. Back in the Control Panel, go to User -> Advanced and click Enable user home service. Click Apply. SSH...