Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I only noticed last minute that it’s time for this month’s edition of Family Photo Chest, so I’ll probably be on the short and wordy side. Let’s get started!
While I explored around a little in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) documentation last time, I rightly came to the conclusion that this system has more features than I will ever need. I knew I would need time –days perhaps– to scout the documentation.
Fortunately, I found a YouTube channel, mydoodads, with an awesome overview of Synology’s NAS operating system, Disk Station Manager. I highly recommend his series I’ve been watching for today’s post: How to Setup and Configure a Synology NAS. Topics are broken into 6 to 12 minute videos, and more importantly to me, his audio is clean and understandable. My one complaint is that he doesn’t always act like Linux is a thing. If you’re here to follow along, just go check his videos. He’s more set up for actual instruction than I am.
In the meantime, my vision for this system was to just have a simple external hard drive I can see from whatever file browser I like, sort of like the “K drive” at my university. My first impression upon seeing the login over a browser and seeing a full desktop was that that was the only way to use it. Watching mydoodads’ tutorial, I learned about the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which looks very much like my memories from the K drive.
There are other ways to access the device, and I’m still deciding how I’m going to get everyone using it. Right now, it’s connected to my personal subnet that won’t let anyone outside look at it, and I’ve given it a static IP of 10.0.1.2. I’ll need to see if it will automatically adjust to the different netmask (I hope I’m using that word correctly).
The one thing I haven’t come across in this video series is setting up RAID, which I already did before. He did go over shared folders, but I still need to set up other basic stuff, like user accounts and groups. Part of why I was getting lost was because I found and started messing with storage pools, which appear to be for when you’re dealing with multiple logical NAS setups on the same network. I still have so much to learn.
Final Question: Have you ever used a network storage? If so, did you understand at the time?