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The Synology End Game

(lowendbox.com)
452 points amacbride | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 06:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.45s | source
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tecleandor ◴[29 Aug 25 08:44 UTC] No.45061701[source]▶
Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff.

On products you can buy TODAY, you find:

  - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches
  - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem
  - Kernel 4.4
  - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app)
  - smbd 4.15
  - PostgreSQL 11.11
  - smbd 8.2p1
  - Redis 6.2.8
  - ...
They claim it's OK because they've backported all security fixes to their versions. I don't believe them. The (theoretical) huge effort needed for doing that would allow them to grow a way better product.

And it's not only about security, but about features (well, some are security features too). We're missing new kernel features (network hardware offload, security, wireguard...), filesystem (btrfs features, performance and error patches...), file servers (new features and compatibility, as Parallel NFS or Multichannel CIFS/SMB), and so on...

I think they got stuck on 4.4 because of their btrfs fork, and now they're too deep on their own hole.

Also, their backend is a mess. A bunch of different apps developed on different ways that mostly don't talk to each other. They sometimes overlap with each other and have very essential features that don't work and don't plan to fix. Meanwhile, they're busy releasing AI stuff features for the "Office" app.

Edit note: For myself and some business stuff, I have a bunch of TrueNAS deployments, from a small Jonsbo box for my home, to a +16 disk rack server. This was for a client that wanted to migrate from another Synology they had on loan, and I didn't want to push a server on them, as they're a bit far away from me, and I wanted it to be serviceable by anyone. I regret it.

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1. ffsm8 ◴[29 Aug 25 10:25 UTC] No.45062320[source]▶
You regret switching them from Synology to Trueness? Am I misunderstanding your final note?

It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology

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2. happytoexplain ◴[29 Aug 25 11:40 UTC] No.45062746[source]▶
"This" in the last paragraph refers to the rest of the comment, not to the preceding sentence.
3. tecleandor ◴[29 Aug 25 13:58 UTC] No.45064223[source]▶
I regret not pushing a bit more for deploying a custom storage solution with TrueNAS (or something similar) instead of Synology. All the TrueNAS devices I have are mine, not from my clients.

They already had one Synology device, they don't have any IT employees on site, and I'd need to take a flight to go to their offices, so I thought that using another Synology device would be better for maintenance. They (and I) were also worried about the noise: it's an small office, and they needed at least 8*3.5" drives, and most of the decent solutions I found for 8 or more drives were big and noisy. The Jonsbo N5 appeared a bit later, that looks like a good candidate today.

Now I found that all their applications are half done, they don't upgrade or fix them regularly, security-wise is a mess, and everything on the backend is super old...