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The Synology End Game

(lowendbox.com)
452 points amacbride | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.405s | source
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tecleandor ◴[] 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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jraph ◴[] No.45061964[source]
Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?
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1. ethersteeds ◴[] No.45062991[source]
As I understand it, they forked years ago when btrfs was very much not ready to be used for production NAS storage. Their value prop was they took it and added lots of their own special patches that they claimed made it highly dependable.

Over time their advantage has eroded as upstream has caught up, to the point that it looks ridiculously out of date today.

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2. arp242 ◴[] No.45065375[source]
And given they're using very old versions of everything, it just sounds like dysfunction and/or moribund development.