💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2023-09-08.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:36:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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You Duped Me, Synology, And I Let Myself Be Duped

For the past 5 years I've had a synology NAS that has beem the "main production" home server, as in, it has stored data and I have accessed it via samba. It was a really cool solution for a time when I had some money, and didn't really want to "manage" a home server. But in the past five years I now am incredibly confident (dunning-kruger or otherwise) in my ability to build and manage a secure, reliable, and cheap Linux home server. I don't need the synology to hand-hold me anymore.

A few things always bothered me about it:

Pushing of cloud services
Proprietary software
Lack of ability to run one's own software on the hardware
Virtualization locked behind RAM upgrades
Weak CPU

And later on, what I learned about the device after having it:

No wireguard in the kernel
Increasingly user-hostile behavior around non-synology branded drives
Increasingly pushy about cloud services
Proprietary backup formats (seriously, just use borg or duplicity or rsync or anything!)

What pushed me over the edge, finally, was a power outage this week. The synology came back up and began issuing 1000 DNS requests every 10 minutes to the checkip and quickconnect services, both of which I have disabled. That's not cool, to me. I don't like that. I don't like how it relies so heavily on stuff I don't really care for.

I want more out of a home server. So I'm using an old enterprise workstation to house the same old disks, reformatting them as luks+btrfs, and going from there. And hey, now I can do NFS right, too.

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