Synology Most Commonly Asked Questions

all right how's it going Neil today I'm going to be going over the most commonly asked questions that I get from clients and just on this YouTube channel about things with Synology Nas because there's a lot of misconceptions and things it's kind of hard to understand the very first time and I want to just make a video going over all of them these are not going to be in any particular order because quite frankly I don't know how to order these because they're just also very different across the board but I will make sure to go ahead and put timestamps down below so if you just got really weird questions just come back to this video and be like oh that's answered in this section and to start we're going to go with the one that is ask by far the most commonly across clients pretty much one in three client calls I hop on the very first thing they ask is this what is home and what is homes it is something that's actually kind of confusing but once you understand it makes total sense it's just presented in an odd enter all right so home and homes I'm gonna go ahead and pull up DSM so people can understand what I'm talking about here and if we look on the left hand side over here we see two folders one of them is called homes and one of them is called home and so this home folder concept has been around since pretty much Unix it has been a very standardized thing that in Linux which Synology is a Linux system right here you pretty much always have a home folder for every single one of your users and so the advantage of this is every single person has their own little space on there so they can store configuration files preferences their own personal stuff all in their own home folder and so whenever you log in as a user anytime you see this home folder this is your personal home folder so right here we can go up here and we can see that I'm signed an as will and so if we take down on this homes folder which shows us everybody else's home folder we will see that there is a will one and they are the exact same folder they're not duplicated they're literally the same folder they're taking out the same space on disk it's just two different views to see the exact same folder so right here because I am signed in as a account with administrator access I have the ability to see everybody else's home folder that's part of being an admin on Linux you essentially get ability to see everybody's files there's no way to turn this off because you are managing the storage as the administrator you have full unrestricted access to the entire Nas which means you can't go ahead and remove yourself from being able to see these you can and then you can always undo it yourself because you have completing control over this box and so because I'm signing as administrator I can see everybody else's home folder here and if we look right here this will folder is the exact same folder as this home folder so just to prove that I'm going to go ahead and make a new folder in here call it demo2 I put it in my home folder and now we're going to refresh and we'll look at homes and all of a sudden the will folder also has a demo2 folder this is because they are the exact same folder anything you do to want is on the other there's no difference in these two folders it's just a different way to see them if it's confusing your users especially those who are connecting over SMB what I like to do is go into control panel go into shared folder and under the homes folder hide this shared folder in my network places so this way when you connect to the nas everybody will still see their own home folder but they will not see the homes folder if they did try to connect to the homes folder and they do not have permission they would not be able to anyway but this way they just don't see it and they don't get confusion there so that is one thing if you don't see it it is all controlled under this users and group setting Advanced enable users home service and you can also change it from one volume to the other here and so essentially every single new user that you add on there as soon as they sign in the very first time they will have a home folder created and it's a good way for them to have their own little space on the Nas and do everything like that but as we said earlier the administrator can see all these files so that way they are constitutes probably sixty percent of the questions I get asked that are just like easy to answer home versus homes confusing but once you understand it it's pretty simple and a very useful feature to have all right so now this is especially with newer users and it makes little sense why can I not just stick a USB port on this thing and hook it up to my computer right here there's a USB port on the front of the snaps when I have my Dash with my little external ssds I just plug it right into my computer and it sees it so the big difference here is the difference between a Nas and a Das a Das direct storage is essentially just a hard drive that you plug right into your computer a Nas which is what a Synology is is network attached storage so what that means is this right here is a server it has its own CPU it has its own component it is its own computer whereas something like this Dash right here which is just a nvme SSD that you plug right into your computer via Thunderbolt it does not have a CPU Ram motherboard anything like that all it has is a controller chip that allows you to talk directly to the storage and so that is why you can't do it this has a lot more of a complex system and USB is designed as a protocol where it's designed to have a client and a server it cannot have a server and a server basically you can't have two computers talking over USB without one of them emulating so if you look at qnaps qnap some of them actually have the ability to be plugged in Via Thunderbolt but the way that actually works is the qnap is actually emulating a 10 gigabit Thunderbolt switch to do that you have to talk to a Nas over a networking protocol so that is your normal ethernet cables that's how it talks and so that's why the thing that you're connecting to back here are the ethernet ports that is how you are grabbing all of your files and so this is going to bring me on to another Point here why is my Nas really slow 85 percent of the time the answer to the question why is my Nas slow it's because of Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is great allows you to access your files right now my laptop's on on Wi-Fi and so I can connect to the nas in there and great but the thing is even really good Wi-Fi sucks because good Wi-Fi speed is 500 megabit if you have a 500 megabit connection that is awesome Wi-Fi but in terms of file transfer speeds that's only about 50 megabytes per second and because of drop packets whenever you've got Wi-Fi and the latency with an SMB connection normally you get way worse than that so the by far the majority of time you find that your Nas is slow and you're under trying to understand why check and see if it's because you're on Wi-Fi and you're connecting to the NASA for Wi-Fi there's not a lot of you can do there other than buy a ethernet port and plug it right into your computer and you will find your speeds increase a ton all right so now on the next one this one's a bit confusing even for people who kind of understand what's going on and that is going to be why does your computer say this connection is not secure even though you're using https so right now I am signed in as you can see with Port 5000 which means I'm signed in as http which is an unencrypted protocol now I'm going to add https and Port 5001 and go there and we are going to see that immediately you get this window right here this connection is not private and this is incredibly confusing and I need to give kind of an explanation as to why that is the case so right here you will get this window a lot and if we click show details we will see that it has a certificate that is not valid and we need to have a very quick explanation as to what certificates are and how to get past this so every single browser is going to have a bit of a different setup for this under Safari you go in and you click more and you say visit this website visit this website and it allows you in and we can see we do have the lock up here every single browser is going to be different I want you know while we start this this is a completely secure connection for you you do not need to worry that there is a man and middle attack going on the reason this is occurring is this guy right here I typed into my browser ds923.local the other thing is you will also always get this if you're using https and you are using an IP address to access the nas so my Nas is on 10.30.0.106 so we do it 10.3.10 and we go to https we will also see we get it so anytime you are either typing in a local address which is an IP address or a DOT local domain you will always get that error unless you do some very complex certificate stuff where you essentially you tell every single on your computers hey this is a certificate you're in a certificate Authority if you know how to do that you don't need to watch this part of the video but essentially anytime you're typing an IP address up here or a host name like ds923.local and you have https on you're going to get that and so this normally happens after users go into control panel login portal and automatically redirect HTTP connections to https and so this will now automatically have people who are on unencrypted HTTP traffic go to https traffic so the thing is the way https works is you have to have a trusted relationship to make sure there's not what's called DNS hash poicing involved and the easiest way to understand this is banking so I'm going to open up a new browser over here and we're going to go to bankofamerica.com so Bank of America people are obviously inputting their Bank credentials on here very sensitive information right so how do I know that this is the real bankofamerica.com if I had a DNS server set up where I said bankofamerica.com is not actually this IP address it is actually this IP address a server I can control I could do that if I ran a coffee shop I could easily do that and basically redirect everybody's traffic instead of going to real Bank of America going to my bank Bank of America and I could download the source code for the site and make it look really really really good so how can we protect ourselves from that and so that is what this lock up here is for this lock right here guarantees that nobody is in between me and Bank of america.com so when I typed in up here www.bankofamerica.com up to the top here it returned a certificate that is signed as www.bankofamerica.com and this is signed with authority essentially what has happened is Bank of America says I own the domain bankofamerica.com they go to a thing called a certificate Authority basically these giant organizations that guarantee that Bank of America actually owns Bank of America they then hand Bank of America a certificate with their website name on it and so the website name matches the certificate and that is used for encryption and so what this is doing is this ensures that the traffic I am sending to bankofamerica.com such as my username password everything like that can only be decrypted by somebody who owns the www.bankofamerica certificate anybody else will not be able to decrypt this traffic even if they got the traffic they would not be able to decrypt it because they do not have that private certificate that is signed as www.bankofamerica so the way SSL encryption Works which is how https works is it always checks the name of the certificate to make sure that it is signed by a certificate Authority people high up and that it matches the name of the website you typed in at the top of your browser and so that way I cannot set up a coffee shop that redirects everybody to Bank of America to my own fake Bank of America because I will not be able to get a certificate that allows me to decrypt traffic going to bankofamerica.com long-winded explanation there but it really helps understand what's going on here now when we go to our Nas this is different we are typing IP address and this IP address you could set up this IP address on your NASA at your house essentially there's I don't own this IP address it's just a private IP address that anybody can pull so there's no way I can get a certificate for 10.30.0.106. nor could I do it for ds923. local those certificates I just can't get so if we click on the lock and see the certificate we're going to see two things first it is self-assigned a self-signed certificate essentially means that I have created my own certificate but I've not gone up and gotten approved by these biggest certificate authorities those certificate authorities essentially tell your browser yes we have independently verified and made sure that he owns www.bankofamerica.com when you self-sign something you're still able to use full encryption but your computer cannot guarantee that you are who you say you are for home users and business users this is not a big deal because you know nobody's in your network faking this but that's why you get these issues and so when you go to the Nas and the nas returns this certificate one the name Synology does not match what I typed in and even then it doesn't matter because it's also not a signed a sell certificate so now let's go about solving this and this is where Quick Connect is great Quick Connect actually has its own certificate so if we go into sir security certificates we will see that ds923 demo.direct.quick connect2 we have a certificate for that and so now when I go into external access and click on the quick connect we will see right here that we got the lock we got the lock in the upper left hand corner without that flash and so now if we look at the certificate show certificate it says this certificate is valid because we went to a subdomain of ds923 demo.direct.quick connect2 we went to that website and that website handed us back which is the server hand us back a certificate for that website meaning our browser knows that this is correct so using Quick Connect allows you to have trusted certificates now for users who do not have any external access to the nas except maybe by VPN server which already does encryption you are not going to be able to get either let's encrypt certificate or a quick connect certificate because you do not have the actual access to prove yourself you'd either have to buy a certificate which would be very expensive and very annoying once you have to come in here or you can just trust your browsers and say yes I know this is it or you can use unencrypted traffic so that is why you get that whenever you get that hey this is not secure message and you're going to your Nas you don't need to worry about it it is a very low likely chance that somebody broke into your network and is performing a man in the middle attack on your Nas it's very unlikely they could steal your data a lot more easily more likely than not if they have that kind of access so you should not worry about it if you ever see that when you're going to anything that you're not hosting yourself you should be worried never click OK proceed whenever you're going to a banking site because that site may not actually be the site you think it is and it may be somebody stealing your data all right so that one was long-winded so let's get back if you have any other questions on this check the link for the description below I am planning on doing a full demonstration on how SSL certificates work because it is quite confusing but let's get back on track so the next one is a very common one and this one I'm not going to be able to do a full explanation here because there's so much to it but the question is hey why can't I not connect to this Nas when I'm not at my house and I'm actually planning on doing a video probably be out about the same time this is so I'll leave a link to that as well in the description below that goes over this but essentially there's three different real ways you can connect your Nas outside of your homes Network when you're in your homes Network and you open up finder you will see on your network you're going to see all your servers as you can see I have quite a few servers running on this network but you see all these different servers but when you leave your house they no longer exist even if you're using a VPN server and so the reason for that is those servers only show up on a layer 2 connection or layer 3 with DNS multicasts not going to go into that here but essentially those only work when you're on your local network or a very specially configured Network what will always work as long as you're on a VPN server is using IP addresses the other thing is the this protocol where we're seeing all these NASA's is not something that is secure to put on the internet it is called SMB and you don't want to do SMB on the internet and so you want to make sure that you're doing one in three things when you're trying to access files outside your home network one which is probably the most complicated is to use a VPN server and that way you can connect to this VPN server hosted on the Nas and then connect back essentially it's like you're at your local network and you're able typing the IP address of an ass and see it all over an encrypted connection two you can use Quick Connect and use something like Synology drive this is by far the easiest way to do it and it just kind of works that the files do have to be locally downloaded to your computer for you to use them so for some workflows it might not work great and finally three is going to be web DAV or webdav this is something you can that's actually designed to be opened up on the internet and is more or less safe to do you can essentially Open up web DAV and then you can mount them on your computer in either Windows or Mac and see them very similarly I'm not going to be able to go over those on this video here but I will be having a follow-on video there it's essentially that you need to be able to have a connection to your Nas that is secure and that's why it does not show up when you leave your network next one is I set up my volume as ext4 and I want to set up as btrfest because I made a mistake and this is an unfortunate answer the only way to do this is essentially if you've gone through and you've set up your volume as an exe4 file system which for the vast majority of users who have the ability is a mistake the only option you have is to essentially backup all the data and then put it all back on after restoring and creating a new volume that's btrfs there is no way to migrate at least none that I've seen so far now we're going to go into a bit of a lightning round just commonly asked questions here that I feel like I need to give an explanation for so a question I'll often ask is hey I have two hard drives in the nas but I only see one of them and it's taking up half the space that it should I should have four terabytes because I've got two two terabyte drives in there likely what has happened is you've gone in and you've set this up as an shr1 that tends to be how people set these things up when you just click through and so what has essentially happened is you have created a volume that two of the drives are mirroring each other and backing each other up this is also true if you have three drives you'll lose one to storage if you're using shr1 and so that is why there is not an easy way to get out of this without having your Nas say oh I'm failing all the time so essentially you'll probably want to if you can just reset up the Nas and when you're selecting your volume create a basic volume where every single drive you add in there will be a different drive and that's just going to be the easiest way to understand or it's very nice to have redundancy though note raid is not a backup another commonly asked question I forgot my username password to the nas or I screwed up a networking configuration or something like that what do I do and so if you do lock yourself out of your Nas or you can't find it or anything like that and you've tried everything else do a soft reset and check out this article right here make sure to read this just in case it has updated in dsm8 or whenever you are watching this video but you're going to want to do a soft reset if at all possible at first essentially what that means is you're going to go ahead and open up the back of your nafs right here look at the back and there's a little reset button one of those pin pushes and you're going to hold that for four seconds until you hear the first beep as soon as you hear the first beep stop holding it because if you hold it for too long and do it a second time it is going to go ahead and format all of your drives which is a hard reset you want to do a soft reset and what this is going to do is it's basically going to reset all your super basic configs back to the regular stuff it is going to reset your networking configuration to DHCP that way if you've done any weird networking configurations they will no longer be there it's going to turn off your firewall it is going to reset the admin account to being existent with no password and so what you'll do is you'll go in you will find your Synology going to find.synology.com type in the username admin with no password and then you will immediately be able to reset the administrator account to a password you know it's also going to do the following things here it's going to disable auto block and remove the autoblock list so that way if you block yourself out it's there and the two things that are really annoying that it does do is one it removes your virtual machine manager cluster which is a pain to get back I've had to do that before not fun and two it removes and it flushes the encryption keys obviously you wanted to flush encryption Keys just so if somebody walks off with this naft they can't grab the encryption keys off there and get your data without having the admin password but you will have to reset those up after that you're just going to want to make sure to give the admin a new password and then disable the admin account if you have not already it's not too big of a deal and everything is kept your users and your data is all kept so you do not have to worry about it too much once again doing a dedicated video for that all right and so that should be pretty much it this is a list I try to keep going and I'm probably going to do a second video so please whatever your questions are put those down in the comments below so I can add to this and build off of it but that is pretty much the stuff that I see so many people either ask in the comments or just in general whenever we're Consulting I do this professionally so if you want to hire me there's a link for that description quitting my job into this full time which is kind of crazy so any other questions you've got leave down in the comments below and let me know what else you think all right have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 17,514

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Id: 82YB21inzTE

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023