Tag Archives: Synology DS224+

Retro Computing: Windows 2000 Professional

After the painful (and unstable) experience of using Windows 95 and Windows 98, Windows 2000 Professional came as a breath of fresh air. It was the first version of Windows I used, based on NT technology. While going through the process of running it on my NAS, I tried to recall what I felt the first time I installed it.

This was almost 25 years ago, and I was apprehensive about moving to a new platform. When I consulted my friend Vishal Chopra about it, his simple advice was “2000 is a higher number than 98, so it is better”.

Windows 2000 Professional: Setup

The first phase of the setup process resembled Linux more than it did other Windows versions.

Yeah sure, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Oooh, a shiny, new, modern file system.

The part of copying files was extremely fast.

The first boot screen was less modern than Windows 98. The second boot screen was more modern than Windows 98, showing a progress bar for the first time.

The second phased of setup felt as if it was running within Windows.

Networking was pretty robust in Windows 2000 Professional. I always felt (maybe placebo effect) that my dial-up internet worked faster and was more stable on it.

The first version of Windows I used that encouraged you to configure a login password.

Windows 2000 Professional: Out of Box Experience

The first order of business was disabling the terrible “getting started” screen forever.

believe this bubble was redundant, as people were already familiar with the Start menu for many years by now.

Second order of business was enabling web content for the desktop and exposing hidden files and folders.

Thankfully, Windows 2000 did not put Task Scheduler in the system tray by default, disabling which was also an action item with Windows 98.

The shut down experience was also much better on Windows 2000.

Luckily, most of the games I played back then worked well on Windows 2000; although DirectX did not come out of the box.

Bye-Bye Synology, Hello Mac Mini

I had been using my Synology NAS for a few months now. However, as I started to do more and more with it, its inherent lack of processing power started to irk me. The CPU was too slow, the RAM too limited. More than that, its ugliness on my living room shelf disgusted me. Eventually, I decided to replace it with a Mac Mini.

Synology DS224+ next to my Mac Mini
Synology DS224+ next to my Mac Mini

Since I was anyways using the NAS more as a computer than for storage (a measly few hundred GBs), the choice was not difficult. I got a good deal on a used Mac Mini M2 Pro and went about migrating my data and services from the Synology.

Remote Access

Since I planned to use the Mac Mini as a headless server, the first thing I needed to do during setup was enable remote access. I used my TV as the initial display. Luckily, macOS has built-in VNC & SSH servers and enabling them was as simple as checking a few boxes.

Remote Management and Remote Login, macOS
Remote Management and Remote Login, macOS
Remote Management, macOS
Remote Management, macOS

With an Apple only environment, you can have better security by

  1. Selecting the “Remote Management”, not the “Screen Sharing” option
  2. Not selecting the “VNC viewers may control screen with password”
  3. Using VNC over SSH when connecting with clients over the internet

The above will break compatibility with most commercial VNC applications. I like Screens 5 & Termius for VNC and SSH respectively. Both apps are paid, but quite powerful.

After verifying that remote access was working, I disconnected the TV, keyboard and mouse for good & haven’t needed them since.

Docker & Threadfin

The service I was most worried about was Threadfin, because it is not natively supported on the Mac and I need to run it within docker.

Thankfully, docker desktop works quite seamlessly on the Mac and the settings & environment variables look similar to container manager on Synology. My only problem was, I couldn’t get the container to auto-start after reboots, using environment variables in the GUI. Eventually, I could get it to work via the terminal

docker update --restart always <container_id>

Once it worked, I could clearly see the performance difference. While on Synology, the container took approx 2-3 mins from start to being usable, on the Mac, it takes less than 10 seconds.

PS: You can’t fetch new images from docker’s repository till you click on the verification link sent via email, if you have created a new account.

CloudflareTunnel

Cloudflare tunnel is installed via homebrew. It is as simple as copy/pasting a few commands via Terminal. Since the configuration of the tunnel is handled from the Cloudflare dashboard, there are no further steps required on the Mac itself.

Bonus feature, Cloudflare also allows you to setup VNC & SSH connections to your device, exposing a web interface to any browser you want to use it with. Over the same tunnel.

Plex & Homebridge

Plex is supported natively on the Mac and installing it is as easy as mounting the disk image. It detected Threadfin as a DVR fairly easily.

At first, Plex refused to detect media content from my external SSD, which was an APFS encrypted volume. However, after erasing it and setting it up as un-encrypted, it was detected fairly quickly. Funnily, once I encrypted it again, it continued to work, so I am not sure what the original problem was.

Homebridge is also natively supported on the mac and is installable via homebrew. Thankfully it comes with backup/restore functionality out-of-the-box, which worked seamlessly. Just had to keep in mind 2 things:

  1. The plugins are not backed up and restored, so these need to be installed on the new machine manually before restoring the backup
  2. I had to delete the bridge from my home app and add it again for my device status to work properly.

Backblaze Backup

Unlike my NAS, there’s no disk redundancy on the mac, so I chose to subscribe for Backblaze’s backup service. It is quite cheap, allows unlimited storage and if you need, they can even send you a USB drive to restore your content from.

Backblaze backup on macOS
Backblaze backup on macOS

It took around 2 days for the client to upload all my data in auto-throttled mode.

qBittorrent

For macOS, most people recommend Transmission to download torrents and the app itself is rock-solid, however, it is lacking support for RSS feeds. One can use add-ons like flexget to enable this, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Eventually, I settled for qBittorrent, which, although dated, has all the necessary features and works quite well. Its web UI is near-unusable on mobile phones, though and I couldn’t find a client on the App Store which works well, yet.

qBittorrent v5.0.5 on macOS
qBittorrent v5.0.5 on macOS

Resource & Environmental monitoring

I use TG Pro to monitor environmental parameters like temperature, fan speeds. It is a paid app, but is quite cheap and requires a one-time-payment only.

I use stats to monitor the CPU, GPU, Memory and bandwidth utilisation on the Mac. It is open-source and installable via homebrew.

Stats & TG Pro on Mac Menu bar
Stats & TG Pro on Mac Menu bar

Summary

Overall, what I miss most from my Synology is its easy-to-use web interface and cloud connectivity features, which worked seamlessly. Even after a lot of effort, I cannot achieve the same level of integration on the mac, as all the services are from separate providers & lack cohesion.

However, the sheer computing power and the lack of physical ugliness more than makes up for it.

Synology DS224+ NAS

I know, I know. I got the Synology DS223j just a month ago. However, I ran across a pretty un-surmountable roadblock with it. It can’t run Virtual machines, which I really want to do. So I returned it and got a Synology DS224+ instead, even though it meant having a device with an Intel Processor.

The first thing I noticed moving from the DS223j to the DS224+ is how much uglier it is.

While the DS223j was beautiful and elegant, the DS224+ is an ugly block which has no business being on a living room shelf.

Anyway, function over form. And functionally, the DS224+ is superior to the DS23j in almost every way.

The first thing you will notice is that the DS224+ is entirely tool-less. No need to open the entire chassis to plug in the hard disks. The front cover pops out and you can just slot the hard drives in. Also, the drives are hot-swappable.

I think not opening the chassis is good in a way that you don’t accidentally nick critical components fiddling around its insides with a screw driver.

The second big upgrade is that you can bump up the (2GB) RAM by an additional 4GB, bringing it up to 6GB. The additional RAM allows the Synology to run VMs, among other things.

While the RAM utilisation on the DS223j was always hovering between the 60-80% marks, the DS224+ mostly stays below 20% with my standard applications (DSM, Plex, HomeBridge, Download Center etc) running.

The NAS also comes with an extra USB 3.0 port, an additional ethernet port (10/100/1000) and a one touch USB copy feature, none of which I care for.

My biggest surprise was that I found the DS224+ to run cooler than the DS223j (Based on the un-scientific measure of the warmth of air exiting its backside). Especially, because going from an ARM processor to an x86/64 processor, I expected exactly the opposite.

A quick comparison on Synology’s website confirms that not only does the DS224+ consumes less power, it also emits less heat under load.

But why is that? Isn’t the ARM architecture known for its power efficiency? A Quick Look at the processor specs doesn’t make things any clearer.

NASCPUSpecifications
DS223jRealtek RTD1619B12nm process, 5W TDP
DS224+Intel Celeron J412514nm process, 10W TDP

Clearly, the ARM CPU is manufactured using a newer process and has half the TDP of the Intel. This means that either the remaining power consumption is from the other NAS components or that the software is not as optimised for the ARMv8 architecture.

Or that the Realtek chip is actually quite inefficient and running closer to its TDP for the same loads.

Either ways, I tried a few days, but couldn’t get used to how ugly the DS224+ was, so I returned it and went back to DS223j.