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May14
I was overjoyed to get a bigger NAS device. Mainly because my Dlink 323 was running out of space, and I yearned for something with a little more usability and functionality. I shopped around looking and compared the QNAP, Synology, Thecus, WD, and even some Drobo units. Smallnetbuilder’s NAS charts were a huge help in getting what I wanted. I’m not here to plug them, I just think they have a lot of useful content and reviews that were suited to what I was looking for.
Moving away from the very consumer based Dlink 323, which was tapped out at 12MBps, I found myself in want of something faster and up to date. Synology’s hardware was sound, with a proprietary hybrid RAID, and a kick ass WebUI that simply destroyed the competition. I originally was hooked on getting the DS1512 +, the price being the breaking point factor in this scenario. I eventually went with the DS413J with 4 x 2TB 7200RPM Seagate Drives. Consider that I was able to purchase the DS413J and four hard drives, the cost of the DS1512+ without hard drives was still MORE expensive.
All the reviews put the Synology Disk Station Manager (DSM) as the multi-faceted powerhouse to which all other NAS devices should follow, and it’s easy to see why. You can drive the unit entirely from a browser any where, has plentiful plugins and offers usability for beginner to expert levels.
First Impressions
The DS413J came in a very marketing-manager-friendly box, plenty of pretty pictures and an overall glossy feel at least made me feel like I had made a worthwhile investment. I was a little shocked to discover there was no manual with this unit, Synology smartly eschewed a physical one for a PDF attached to disk. A nice little touch. The unit was immaculate, pristine and wrapped with care in a sheen of plastic wrap and free of dust and any other particulates. Unboxing the NAS felt more like working with a professional scientific instrument instead of a toy, it’s well put together and presented that it just has that feel to it. I wasn’t crazy with the white plastic encasing the unit, the brushed aluminum top and back likely does more for cooling, but if it was entirely black or entirely aluminum that would have been a nice touch. As it is, the white will do – if you’re nit-picky about that sort of thing.
The Box the Disk Station arrived in. Plenty of pretty picture on all sides and top. There’s even links to partner companies listed in bullet format
Hardware
The power brick is a large, unflattering chunk of plastic – if only the power supply was embedded in the unit it would have saved me a little more space on my Rack. There’s ample screws for hard drive installation, from 1.5mm to 2.5mm, flat and flushed heads: more than enough for 4 drives. The drive trays are simple flat gray plastic with no rubberized anti-vibration absorption, but the engineers have tightly integrated them into the NAS chassis, so there’s no movement anyway. The front of the unit has seven LED indicator lights: Power, Status, LAN, and one LED for each hard drive inserted. The colors are straightforward for anyone to understand as well: Green=Good, Red=Bad. The middle power button is always blue, probably because it just looks cool.
Blinking LED indicators tell you at a quick glance what’s going on with power, LAN, and your Hard drives. No LCD display, but you can do everything from the DSM web GUI
Software
This is where the Synology really shines, after setting up and formatting hard drives (surprisingly quick), you are given a choice to either install the DSM from the Synology external update site or manually (you first download the package and point to it). I did the latter and installed it from my laptop via a wireless connection. Immediately after logging in, DSM tells you such items as uptime, resource monitoring, logs and current connections all as a pop up in the bottom right hand side. The wizard can help you configure backup, router configuration for firewall and external port access and offers easy to read configuration items in the control panel from the start.
DSM treats your experience like another desktop, complete with icons, and Windows-esque useful health ‘gadgets’ such as health monitors, transfers, logs and whatever else you can decide from the drop down menus
Usability
Easily the most user friendly NAS device I’ve ever come across; the hardware is straightforward – plug in your drives, provide power and ethernet, and press the power button. The Synology Disk Station Manager (DSM) AJAX web server is incredibly powerful and lightning quick, even from external access where my uploads are slower. Mounting files from within the DSM was a snap, just open their File Station (equivalent of Explorer, or if you prefer, Finder) and mount the remote folder share you have on your network. Creating users and groups is intuitive and fast, the linux style of read/access based on shares makes things much easier to figure out. The Packages are well put together and definitely have great business potential; such as the multiple CRM’s, Wiki abilities, Mailstation and VPN server. Even the backups are dead simple; I configured my old linux based NAS into an Rsync location for the DS413J. The dual USB ports even allow for plugging in of external hard disks for USB copy / backup jobs, and everything can be scheduled. The system log is also very useful for tracking down changes and logins, as well as the health monitor that tells you every task-manager-esque what’s going on, who’s doing what and what processes are using CPU and memory.
Quick pic of currently installed packages on the DSM GUI. You can add even more 3rd party applications that are handy like ‘currently connected’
Features
I only have great things to say about the DSM, it’s like logging into a new computer each time you add a new package. The new features add a new dimension each time, allowing for further tweaks and functionality that wasn’t before present. Some such as Media Server didn’t appeal to me, but others such as 3rd party add-ons like Switch Service and Current Connection make the experience much more informative. With such features like Radius Server, I could now change my wireless encryption to an enterprise level format capable of local and ldap authentication protocols. I’m sure the next time I’m a party, I’ll have to drop that nugget of information. Other features such as media station helps create an internal website complete with thumbnails and auto-playing movies and streaming audio (even over the internet). There’s so much power at the DSM’s disposal, that it would take a whole article for each add-on feature, and we’d I’d still explain how they interact with each other.
The DSM package center has endless possibilities with different configurations and applications with items for business, productivity, web and mail serving and more
Performance
I struggled with the price and (theoretical) performance of the much meatier Synology 1512+. When weighing price vs. performance, the 413J came out ahead and I save a few hundred dollars a result. Synology Claims a maximum 53MBps Upload (write) and 108MBPs Download (read) on their website when working with a 5GB file and 1500MTU max over a 1Gbps LAN environment. My own benchmarks were not far from the result, although I did tweak my settings with 9000MTU on the Synology and Intel NIC with Win7 64x Ultimate edition with a 5GB file and the speed was little over 50MBps for a write, and around 55MBps for a read.
Verdict
I am definitely sold on the Synology name brand. The DSM software gives a user complete control of data, backups, security, and a whole plethora of other features with the additional Synology packages available for download. With features like SSH ability at the flip of a switch, remote management that’s both easy, intuitive and icon based, I only have great things to say about the Synology DSM unit. The price is right for this unit, larger Synology units can accommodate more hard drives, have greater integration with virtualization platforms and even greater transfer speeds. For the home user with storage needs, it’s a near perfect offering.
Closing Thoughts
I wrote a ‘love letter to Drobo’ some time ago. I revisited the Drobo box with hope that I my opinions would have changed. Not surprisingly, I’m still disappointed with drobo’s performance and lack of options. I stand by my original post, the product feels unfinished and flaky, and under performs in simple tasks like file transfers. Presented with both choices for a NAS device, I would pick the Synology 10 times out of 10.
May10
I always thought that Windows 7 would automatically switch to the next fastest connection. I’d been trying to figure out why it seems to stick with a wireless connection even after connecting a network connection. Turns out, Windows 7 eschews speed for reliability.
I especially found this annoying when, after booting and automatically being connected to the wireless I plugged into CAT5 and tried transferring a file from my NAS only to see my wireless connection hitting the ceiling at 3.5MBps second. Luckily, I’ve found a solution that’s been covered in other places, but I like to put my own spin on things:
1. Goto Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center, click on Change adapter settings
2. From the adapter menu hit ‘alt’ to bring up the Windows File editing menu, and you’ll see the super-hidden ‘Advanced’ column that’s been evading you all these years. Then to Advanced Settings…
3. This brings you to a listing of connections by priority. Notice that Wireless is along the top, or first in priority. Simply move the Local Area Connection to the top or just above the wireless connection. Hit OK.
4. All done! Now the next time you boot up with wireless, and plug in a wired connection Windows 7 will automatically switch to the ‘fastest’ connection!
Sep14
Exchange 2010 – get list of disconnected mailboxes immediately
on September 14, 2012 at 16:11Posted In: IT
Once a mailbox is disabled from the Exchange 2010 console, it shows up in the disconnected mailboxes after the nightly maintenance. Sometimes however, a company can change it’s mind at the last minute and decide to either hire someone back and that’s when the IT admin has to bring that disconnected mailbox back within the hour.
Instead of waiting around for the nightly maintenance to occur, you can force your Exchange 2010 server to pick up the mailboxes almost immediately.
1. First and foremost, re-enable the user’s Active Directory account, as it has all the proper SSID’s and is actually the name you want to restore.
2. Check the disconnected mail, if you just disabled it you likely will not see it
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3. if you don’t see it there, you’ll have to manually do the mailbox cleanup (commonly known as maintenance. Open up a Exchange power shell and issue the cmdlet:
Get-MailboxDatabase | Clean-MailboxDatabase
Be careful with this command, as it cleans all your mailstores. If you have only one mailstore you want to run this command on, you have to use:
Clean-MailboxDatabas “Your Database Name”
4. Once you’ve done that, refresh your disconnected mailboxes and you should see the mailbox you want to reconnect:
5. From here, right click and reconnect the mailbox you want!
-Dexter
Sep11
When you have to remote desktop to a Windows based server or computer, your default option is RDC protocol. This is a useful utility if you’re connecting to one computer at a time. So what if you need to connect to ten or more? Do keep in mind, not all those computers have the same credentials, and saving all those .RDP files to your desktop will get very cumbersome.
There’s a handy tool from Microsoft: Remote Desktop Connection Manager that allows you to do just that.
As you can see from the screencap directly from MS techblog, the application lets you open multiple RDC connections at a time giving you full control over: inherited credentials, gateway settings for VPN connections, individual display settings, individualized local resources… the list goes on. Super handy utility when I was building a new virtual environment with Hyper-V; after creation of the VM, I put in the server name with full credentials and saved it under the proper group.
I’ve used other tools similar to this such as the RSAT tool that felt unfinished, as well as RoyalTS, VisionAPP, and Terminals. All these programs worked well for what I used them for, but each had their own little quirks and last minute features such as screen-shot ability. The part I like the most about RDC Manager from Microsoft is the price: completely free. Plus, it just feels like it goes with the rest of the Windows experience, from the toolbars to the menus it definately feels like a MS product.
So if you need to remote to a hell of a lot of computers and like a freebie that’s right from Microsoft, give it a shot.
-Dexter
