16 ms·

The latest DSM update makes btrfs drives unavailable on budget Synology models

254 points by dsego 6y ago

kwyjobojoe 6y ago
Issue: drives become inaccessible on upgrade. Issue closed: intended behaviour, won't fix. I can't think of a worst act by a company that makes data storage devices than to intentionally and deliberately break data stored by their customers. What a stupid and nasty action by a terrible company. They deserve to be sued into oblivion
- jlawer 6y ago
  The only thing worse is the tone deaf customer service responses. Such as: - Wanting root SSH access to someone's device to investigate? - Suggesting getting a higher spec Synology device would be able to fix the problem I use a DS918+ at home which I got after having deployed Clustered RS units for VM storage in a previous role. The recent moves from the company (not certifying their devices with non first party hard disks, pushing more user licensed features (VPN/Email)) and a feeling that software quality is in decline (acknowledged bug in Apple TV app hasn't been fixed in at least 8 months). It a real shame that both Synology seems to be following the ubiquiti route to smash their reputation to increase revenue.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    Oh I hate that “grant access” so much, at least to date they have never pushed back when I’ve said no thank you and it’s not been required
    - gbil 6y ago
      At the same time the security advisor in Synology DSM spams you with notifications to disable the admin user account after creating another account with admin rights first
      - prepend 6y ago
        I’ve used synology for 10 years and really liked them. But there’s quite a few annoying things popping up more frequently. This is an example of a stupid error that I can’t turn off. They’re starting to assume that all devices are internet connectable and subject to brute force. That seems insane to me and my synology is on a private network with no inbound connectivity. I don’t want to change from admin.
        katbyte 6y ago
        Isn’t there a Config page somewhere the let’s you pick what warnings to show?
        prepend 6y ago
        Not that I’ve found through searching their docs and walking through the UI, but I haven’t really dig deeply into the internals.
        manicdee 6y ago
        Your Maginot line is only providing imaginary security. Actual IT security is in depth, and the simple task of having an admin account that is not the default user ID makes sense to me. What zero days are out there that rely on a known user ID, and a known process ID for that user’s first process? You could defeat that by just following the advice from people that know better.
        prepend 6y ago
        I’m not trying to provide absolute security as it’s for my home network. If there’s a zero day ravaging my kids iPad then that’s the risk I take. And it’s acceptable given my situation. “People that know better” for my situation seems pretty hard to qualify. I’m glad it makes sense to you, but since you have zero insight to my config and the changes required to implement I think it says more about the quality of your recommendations that you can give a recommendation without understanding the usability trade offs. Maginot lines suck for protecting countries, but simple, clear defenses are pretty darn handy for protecting home networks. I’ll take a disconnected NAS over a wonderfully synced, fully compliant NAS following every recommendation (that also includes making it network accessible).
    - tw04 6y ago
      You must have lucked out. I tried getting them to fix hyperbackup issue and sent them detailed logs of exactly what was breaking and how. It wasn't honoring the port setting from what I recall. They refused to even look at the logs if I wasn't willing to give them root access to the primary system. I told them that wasn't an option but I was happy to provide any log they wanted and they just never responded to the case again.
- xiwenc 6y ago
  If Synology doesn’t resolve this PR drama soon, affected customers should indeed try the legal route. Not sure if Synology has their ass covered via terms of service. Even if they did, it’s their fault people lost access to their data. Interesting to see how this unfolds.
  - izacus 6y ago
    What kind of legal route is there though? The NASes were explicitly sold without support for btrfs (when I was looking at options, they were clear about that). They explicitly did not allow creation of btrfs arrays and did not expose any settings related to them. To get btrfs, you had to use another btrfs capable NAS and then move the drives over to use that unsupported functionality (which was, again not documented and clearly marked as unsupported) and this patch has now removed a module that allowed for accidental use of that unsupported functionality. What legal grounds do you have here?
    - makomk 6y ago
      A few people seem to have confirmed this isn't actually true - at some point, it was possible to set up at least some of the affected NAS devices using btrfs via the standard GUI on the device. It's possible there were some intermediate software releases which disabled that but still allowed existing btrfs volumes to be used.
    - watt 6y ago
      Sue them for damages and see what sticks. Causing data loss like this is inexcusable. As a customer in Germany I sure hope the consumer protection agency (Verbraucherzentrale) could make them sing.
      - op00to 6y ago
        Way too technical, will never get anywhere. Have better backups and don’t play cute games with important data storage.
        6y ago
- chrisandchris 6y ago
  Is it? They explicitly did never support the fileysystem on the mentioned device and it was only possible because of a bug in their implementation. I don‘t want to be on any side. But is it wrong to fix a bug?
  - bellyfullofbac 6y ago
    Seems like it was a marketing bug ("spec says: only provide this feature for people who paid us more money", implementation says: "everyone gets this feature"), but the "fix" is for the affected people to move everything out of the affected devices, reset them, and copy the data back.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Is there any technical reason why it is not supported? Also, just for curiosity, and without condoning what the company is doing, is there a good reason to use btrfs for a device like that? I was thinking that good filesystem repair facilities are important once you store a lot of data, and btrfs is inferior to ext4 on this? I find btrfs is fantastic if you have, say, a bunch of Yocto images, or a large video you are working on, and you want to quickly create and erase snapshots of many gigabytes of data, but what is the advantage here?
  - lovedswain 6y ago
    > Is there any technical reason why it is not supported? No familiarity with these devices, but there is at least a slim chance if it was an embedded device, they needed the flash or RAM for something else. Seen this happen elsewhere before
  - dosenbrot 6y ago
    We already store a lot of data at home. And ssd and hdd storage has sometimes read errors. With terabytes of data we come across a handful error s per year, most of them will nobody notice. I use btrfs everywhere I can and see sometimes errors, most times on heavy written files like databases(sqlite files) or virtual harddisks, sometimes even pictures or logfiles. Even without RAID you could restore the file from a backup (If you try to backup a broken file, the computer won’t let you).
  - op00to 6y ago
    Not enough RAM, possibly the CPU they chose wasn’t fully tested.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    These "j" devices have like 512 MB of RAM and an ARM CPU. I believe the devices they do support BTRFS on all have 1-2 GB+ RAM and x86 CPUs.
    - brnt 6y ago
      Then how come it did work before? BTRFS as used in DSM is not particularly more memory intensive than EXT4 (which is why it did work before).
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Legal ransomware. Nice.
rodgerd 6y ago
That is not the context I have in my head for DSM.
- pengaru 6y ago
  diamond star motors?
  - rincebrain 6y ago
    I would hypothesize that the poster, like me, thinks of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    You can get an idea of what people think of by Googling. All but one of the first page of results for DSM is the same thing. None of them are what this article is about.
- leemcd56 6y ago
  Right? I was thinking, “What does the DSM, a medical manual, have to do with hard drives?”
amanzi 6y ago
That's awful behaviour! I've been researching NAS devices and until now, Synology has been on my preferred list. Reconsidering that position now - I've never heard of a company breaking something so significant with a minor version upgrade and without warning.
- sjansen 6y ago
  I’ve been thinking it was about time to replace my current Synology device, and until seeing this was planning on sticking with them. Now I’m hoping to see recommendations for an equally low maintenance replacement in the comments.
justapassenger 6y ago
Wow, this beyond unacceptable and borderline illegal. Even tho I’m very happy owner of Synology, my next NAS won’t be it for sure. What are good alternatives for home usage? QNAP?
- infogulch 6y ago
  TrueNAS?
  - acidbaseextract 6y ago
    I built a 6 disk TrueNAS Raid-Z2 box two years ago and though it was inconvenient to build vs buying something off the shelf, TrueNAS has been excellent. Does what it says on the tin and continually improving with each release. Their cloud sync and UPS functionality have been great (flaky power around here). Haven't dug into the TrueNAS' ZFS pool/snapshot management and jails management (FreeBSD's containers) functionality, but both are compelling once I get time and a good project for them. The NAS performing so well has me itching to upgrade to 10 gigabit ethernet around the house once prices come down a bit. Also I ran the OS off mirrored thumb drives until recently. That was pretty nifty.
  - mwambua 6y ago
    I've been thinking about going down the TrueNAS route (the TrueNAS Mini series looks really nice), but it seems a little expensive. Is the extra cost worth the convenience of having a machine that you know will stay compatible with FreeNAS?
    - acidbaseextract 6y ago
      Here's a detailed review that answers that question: https://www.servethehome.com/ixsystems-truenas-mini-x-zfs-nas-review/ https://www.servethehome.com/ixsystems-truenas-mini-x-zfs-na... (the video linked there is also good) On page 5 they tally it up as a $400 difference vs building your own.
      - 6y ago
jordemort 6y ago
Wow, OK, I'll never buy anything from Synology.
qsi 6y ago
Ouch, this is terrible. I have been happy with my Synology NASes over the last decade or so, and their tech support, but this really, really, rubs me the wrong way. I am not affected by this act of deliberate vandalism, but Synology's reputation has been very seriously tarnished; this is close to the worst possible thing you can do as a storage provider. I cannot in good conscience recommend their products after this. Very disappointing.
- izacus 6y ago
  Maybe you should actually read about what happened before throwing judgements? You had to specifically workaround using another Synology model to get into this state.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    That's not true. I have a j and remember seeing the btrfs option when creating my volume. I remember it because I was not familiar with that file system and took the time to read up on it. Decided on ext4 anyway because it's what I was knew. So at least from my POV, the UI did allow creating a volume and let you get into this state.
rhodozelia 6y ago
Crap like This is why I don’t apply updates to my own laptop or the power stations I work on. If a system is working properly the last thing I want is changes I can’t audit. Keep them off the internet and it is amazing what works can continue working in the same way. I would have way more outages, breakage, and features gone missing due to updates than missing out on “security patches” and getting targeted by hackers
tedd4u 6y ago
I bought a DSXXX+ instead of a DSXXXj last year specifically to _get_ btrfs based on this https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare/DS220+/DS220j https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare/DS220+/DS220... I guess at some point they forgot to turn the feature flag for btrfs off on "j" models and now they are "fixing" that? Seems doable but with a lot of communication & control for customers and at a very minimum it should go read-only. Super bad for their brand and their customers. Synology users, consider disabling automatic DSM updates. I have mine set to email me when there's a new version. Works fine.
- katbyte 6y ago
  Generally should always disable auto updates
- vetinari 6y ago
  No, it was never possible to create btrfs volumes on the j-models. What was possible, was to put the drives into plus model, create the volume, and migrate the drives into j model. Even migrations that are not supported are pretty much possible. Or were, with the uodate not anymore.
  - duckfang 6y ago
    Wow, the bots are out in full force on this thread. I've seen the proof on twitter and elsewhere it was 100% an option in the GUI. Enough of your gaslighting, Synology.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      Yeah, bots, everyone who doesn't subscribe to hivemind or doesn't join the mob is a bot, sigh... I can show you similar screenshot. Does not make it genuine. I used to own a value series Synology NAS, and it was not possible to create btrfs volume. For extra fun, it was also possible to create only 32-bit ext volume (i.e. limited to 16TB; if your pool had more, you had to create separate volumes) and it didn't support some ext4 features, so you had to be very careful when creating volume on external device.
paulmd 6y ago
Don't use btrfs. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else. It's not battle-proven or well-maintained, so from a long-term stability standpoint why would you ever want to use it in the first place? kidding not kidding, this was linus's non-sequitur when people complained about deliberate kernel breakage (relicensing of kernel symbols) to prevent interoperability, which I think is apropos in this situation of deliberate breakage. "You shouldn't be using this in the first place, it's not a good product, just migrate your data to use ZFS, ez, next question plz". Pretty straightforward solution, you must agree ;)
- j16sdiz 6y ago
  Yes, but they disable btrfs in firmware upgrade, without providing any ways to migrate the data.... This is not good customer experience, don't you agree?
- lathiat 6y ago
  The problem is nothing to do with btrfs itself, synology intentionally disabled its usage on specific models in a firmware update (supposedly because it wasn't supposed to be enabled in the first place - but had let or allowed people to do so for some time).
  - paulmd 6y ago
    And there was never a problem with ZFS apart from the kernel team intentionally re-licensing symbols to block ZFS once they saw the ZFS team using them ;)
sliken 6y ago
Seems a rather flagrant disregard for users/customers. The number one priority for any NAS is to never lose a user's files. So what's a good alternative, preferably with ZFS support.
- xoa 6y ago
  TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS but got a rebrand). Built around ZFS and FreeBSD, it's a really solid and more focused NAS product. DSM has more general features like their whole surveillance software and such, but with a touch of irony NAS for important data is the main thing I didn't ever trust Synology for given the lack of ZFS. TrueNAS can do some other stuff but primarily it's about doing NAS right and fast, and if you want something dedicated to that role and more turnkey (obviously you could just set up any system with Linux and ZoL or FreeBSD naked and NFS yourself) it's well worth a look. It's BSD license, and iXsystems is the primary developer behind it. They do offer some of their own hardware, so you can get a similar "commercially supported buy and turn on" experience to Synology if you'd like, though I don't think the value proposition from them right now is the best for home users or certain SMB. But it's there. And unlike DSM there's no workarounds needed to run it wherever which is another huge tick in its favor IMO. With something as critical as a NAS I don't mind paying a company for support or hardware, but lack of official easy exit options makes me nervous. For reasons like, well, this?
bartvk 6y ago
Although it looks bad, I'm actually curious how many people turned this on. I have barely any experience with Synology; when you start using one, does it actively ask you to use btrfs?
- izacus 6y ago
  Not on the models listed, since they did not support btrfs on j models at any time.
ac29 6y ago
Since it seems like some folks are responding to the headline here, not the actual article: Btrfs was never supported nor advertised to be supported on these lower end devices. But, it seems like if you created the btrfs drives on another device that did officially support them, you could then import them onto the unsupported hardware platform. Still, its a bad look for Synology. Seems like the lack of btrfs on the lower end devices was merely artificial product segmentation, not an actual hardware limitation.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  From comments: > I set up a new device and the DSM software itself gave me the possibility to create a BTRFS volume from scratch. > (...) > It was there, for over a year, and now my data is kept ransom by Synology because they decided I need to buy an upgraded model.
throw4738 6y ago
Stupid question: Does dedicated NAS have any advantages for power user? Buy some cheap Ryzen box, stuff it with harddrives, install Centos and forget about it....
- rfoo 6y ago
  For engineers with enough time (and able to do troubleshooting), no, no advantages. For everyone else, they do have advantage, most thing you wanted is 1 click away, including something tedious for average "power users", like "using btrfs safely with RAID-5-like disk array" (so that you can take a snapshot of your drive) mentioned here.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  It's actually very user friendly.. You can buy a DSM license to install on a normal machine
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > You can buy a DSM license to install on a normal machine Do you have a link to a licence sales page?
    - jbverschoor 6y ago
      I'm quite positive I've seen it for custom hardware.. but it seems VDSM is only available (officially) for Synology devices. https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/VDSM_License_Pack https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/VDSM_License_Pac... I know xpenology uses the official software, but I'm not sure if that is legal.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Electrical power consumption is a point worth looking at.
lathiat 6y ago
What a stupid change. They claim support can help temporarily, but still. Let's assume for a moment they want to go ahead and disable this accidentally enabled feature, OK, but they should have changed it such that - On existing installs: You could mount existing volumes, but not create new ones - Start showing a warning to users asking them to migrate - If they are desperate, on new installs, you could potentially disable mounting existing volumes or at least and a stern warning. (The downside is for example, if your NAS died, you got a new one, migrated the drives, you can't access them again. So this is a hit and miss idea, depending on how keen they are to push disabling the feature) The good and bad news is that in all liklihood they didn't intentionally brick existing users but instead some braindead engineer went "oh that's not supposed to be enabled it, let's disable it" and didn't think about or realise how it would affect existing users until it was rolled out. Good because less malice, bad because they should ideally have smarter engineers reviewing such things.
adwn 6y ago
What's my best option if I want to buy a compact, energy-efficient NAS on which I can install Linux? I just want the hardware, and not pay for the vendor's crappy, inflexible software.
- mnd999 6y ago
  I got a Helios64. It's a little rough around the edges but it works. Also runs FreeBSD.
  - tremon 6y ago
    That looks nice! I see the HDD trays are secured with screws though, does it support hot-swapping disks?
    - mnd999 6y ago
      Yes, I've certainly done it. The slots are pretty stiff so you don't massively need the screws - I didn't put them in until I was sure everything was assembled and working correctly.
- tremon 6y ago
  I don't think there's many options left. I still have a QNAP TS-419P here running mainstream 5.10 kernel (it's no longer Debian since they dropped support for it), but I don't think newer models are as easily reinstalled with a custom distro. A custom-built mini-ITX machine or a Proliant Microserver would be my next recommendations. But they're not nearly as energy efficient as a consumer-grade NAS.
  - jnxx 6y ago
    > But they're not nearly as energy efficient as a consumer-grade NAS. I agree that over multiple years, electrical power becomes a substantial part of the cost (and also the environmental footprint). Small ARM systems with sufficient memory and fast interfaces are perfect for that.
- 6y ago
chx 6y ago
I wonder, can they be sued for this...?
izacus 6y ago
The title is hugely misleading though - the j model documentation was always very specific that they can't support btrfs and you could never initialize the array into that mode. (At least it was when I was buying my Synology - and opted to + model which specifically supports it. This is the list devices Syno has with btrfs support: https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/Which_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...) The RAID array had to be moved from another device to work. Running your RAID array on a device that explicitly doesn't support it feels like a really risky behaviour.
- wasyl 6y ago
  They still should've handled it differently. Show a warning to the user encouraging them to migrate, give a reasonable window before the feature is actually disabled, and don't let the users upgrade to a version which will break their storage. Synology made a mistake which they admit: > DSM incorrectly allowed administrators to migrate from a BTRFS-capable device and utilize previously created BTRFS volumes on the affected devices And they're punishing users for it
  - izacus 6y ago
    Yeah, that's the crappy part. My intuition says that they didn't deliberately plan to remove it and it was a side effect of some firmware update cleanup.
- brnt 6y ago
  What is the reason it cannot be 'supported' anyway? It clearly was possible. BTRFS has been mainlined for nearly as long as EXT4, and incurs no particular overheads compared to EXT4.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Whatever reason they chose to not support btrfs on their cheap ARM models. Might be stability, might just be pure market segmentation.
wasyl 6y ago
This is absurd, how did nobody in charge realize that a storage/backup device which intentionally renders the data unavailable after any update, not just a patch, is absolutely crazy? And now I'm anxious to update my DS920+ which it seems is not affected by this change but am I willing to risk _any_ updates at this point?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisLomont 6y ago
NAS users do things explicitly not supported, working around built in enforcement in some cases. Then, when Synology blocks the unsupported actions to prevent having even more things to check and test, users complain. It may be no more nefarious than some thing they did want to add would create more problems if they left these holes in the code. These actions were always unsupported. It's like complaining using unpublished APIs does not work in future versions. It's also surprising how many people, likely not even Synology NAS users, misread the article, and jump into full outrage mode.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >These actions were always unsupported. That's not true. At one time, their DSM gave you the option of creating a btrfs filesystem when setting up from scratch. It may have been "unsupported" but their own setup process allowed you to continue.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    Are you sure? Sounds like on here and on Reddit people were creating volumes outside of the affected devices or DSM and mounting them on the affected devices. For example, [1] "From my reading, you could never take new drives, stick them in a budget Synology NAS and get BTRFS. The thing is, you could set up those new drives in a higher end Synology NAS, then stick them into a budget Synology NAS and it would work with BTRFS enabled." This type of comment seems repeated in various outlets. Have you personally created a btrfs filesystem on one of these 5 affected devices? I've bought Synology NAS for a long time. Each time I buy one for myself or others, I read the spec sheet and specifically buy one that supports btrfs. It's clearly listed for each model what it supports. If it is as they state, this unintentional bug was allowing people to do things that are not validated to run reliably, then leaving the bug unfixed is also a bad idea. Relying on bugs to do your work is a bad plan. This shows why. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/mqks2q/the_latest_dsm_update_makes_btrfs_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/mqks2q/the_latest...
runfalk 6y ago
I've had a less than stellar experience with their support too. I'm the author of a reasonably popular WireGuard plugin (https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard) and in the next DSM version they are basically breaking all kernel module plugins without a migration path. A kind user has found a workaround and made a PR, but Synology have no interest in helping out with this (https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard/issues/66#issuecomment-755716035 https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard/issues/66#issu...).
- taffit 6y ago
  I'm terrified reading this, as I've set up your wonderful plugin not long time ago and it is working flawlessly. Very bad, Synology, very sad ..
  - runfalk 6y ago
    Glad you like it! Don't worry too much as we currently have a workaround. Their SDK still allows us to build kernel modules but the installation experience now requires manually switching the package post installation to allow root access . This of course assumes that Synology doesn't remove this option before DSM 7 is released.
- tw04 6y ago
  Reading that it's pretty obvious they're preventing modules to try to kill of XPEnology. Sometimes Synology baffles me, the users that are part of the XPEnology project were never going to be paying customers anyway, and they seem to go to extraordinary efforts to try to stop them. The "this is for security reasons" is just silly, none of the exploits they've been hit by to date that I'm aware of utilize or require inserting a kernel module into the system. And if they have the infrastructure to sign modules to allow insertion, they could extend you whatever signing they utilize. It's not like a nation state actor couldn't hack Syno corporate and get access to signing keys if they were after a targeted attack...
- paws 6y ago
  Do I understand this right, DSM v7 intends to take away root access in some way? Ugh. Another negative to add to the list. For me Synology has mostly been a disappointment, I'm sorry to say. Seems their software has been generally in decline for a while. DSMv7 was delayed over a year ago [1], and now they don't expect to ship until summer 2021. v7 doesn't seem to bring anything interesting to the table IMO, and now they want to take away root? Meanwhile the only thing I saw from v6 updates was a request for spying/telemetry [2]. Wanted to like Syno but it's too locked down, too expensive, too annoying. My position [3] hasn't changed from last year - I don't see myself buying a Syno product again, nor recommending them to most of my technical friends. [1] https://www.snbforums.com/threads/dsm-7-preview-delayed-until-q3-2020.61798/ https://www.snbforums.com/threads/dsm-7-preview-delayed-unti... [2] https://imgur.com/a/Yzgw7hq https://imgur.com/a/Yzgw7hq [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738360
tyingq 6y ago
The most constrained thing on these models seems to be RAM. The listed model all have either 512MB or 1GB RAM. Is that the limitation being cited as a problem for btrfs?
eecc 6y ago
Meh, this and all processes running as root I might just nuke the native OS and just use a Linux distro. Any suggestions?
Arubis 6y ago
For anyone else confused, in this case DSM is DiskStation Manager. (I initially thought it was diagnostic criteria.)

254 points by dsego 6y ago

Issue: drives become inaccessible on upgrade. Issue closed: intended behaviour, won't fix. I can't think of a worst act by a company that makes data storage devices than to intentionally and deliberately break data stored by their customers. What a stupid and nasty action by a terrible company. They deserve to be sued into oblivion

jlawer 6y ago
The only thing worse is the tone deaf customer service responses. Such as: - Wanting root SSH access to someone's device to investigate? - Suggesting getting a higher spec Synology device would be able to fix the problem I use a DS918+ at home which I got after having deployed Clustered RS units for VM storage in a previous role. The recent moves from the company (not certifying their devices with non first party hard disks, pushing more user licensed features (VPN/Email)) and a feeling that software quality is in decline (acknowledged bug in Apple TV app hasn't been fixed in at least 8 months). It a real shame that both Synology seems to be following the ubiquiti route to smash their reputation to increase revenue.
- katbyte 6y ago
  Oh I hate that “grant access” so much, at least to date they have never pushed back when I’ve said no thank you and it’s not been required
  - gbil 6y ago
    At the same time the security advisor in Synology DSM spams you with notifications to disable the admin user account after creating another account with admin rights first
    - prepend 6y ago
      I’ve used synology for 10 years and really liked them. But there’s quite a few annoying things popping up more frequently. This is an example of a stupid error that I can’t turn off. They’re starting to assume that all devices are internet connectable and subject to brute force. That seems insane to me and my synology is on a private network with no inbound connectivity. I don’t want to change from admin.
      - katbyte 6y ago
        Isn’t there a Config page somewhere the let’s you pick what warnings to show?
        prepend 6y ago
        Not that I’ve found through searching their docs and walking through the UI, but I haven’t really dig deeply into the internals.
      - manicdee 6y ago
        Your Maginot line is only providing imaginary security. Actual IT security is in depth, and the simple task of having an admin account that is not the default user ID makes sense to me. What zero days are out there that rely on a known user ID, and a known process ID for that user’s first process? You could defeat that by just following the advice from people that know better.
        prepend 6y ago
        I’m not trying to provide absolute security as it’s for my home network. If there’s a zero day ravaging my kids iPad then that’s the risk I take. And it’s acceptable given my situation. “People that know better” for my situation seems pretty hard to qualify. I’m glad it makes sense to you, but since you have zero insight to my config and the changes required to implement I think it says more about the quality of your recommendations that you can give a recommendation without understanding the usability trade offs. Maginot lines suck for protecting countries, but simple, clear defenses are pretty darn handy for protecting home networks. I’ll take a disconnected NAS over a wonderfully synced, fully compliant NAS following every recommendation (that also includes making it network accessible).
  - tw04 6y ago
    You must have lucked out. I tried getting them to fix hyperbackup issue and sent them detailed logs of exactly what was breaking and how. It wasn't honoring the port setting from what I recall. They refused to even look at the logs if I wasn't willing to give them root access to the primary system. I told them that wasn't an option but I was happy to provide any log they wanted and they just never responded to the case again.
xiwenc 6y ago
If Synology doesn’t resolve this PR drama soon, affected customers should indeed try the legal route. Not sure if Synology has their ass covered via terms of service. Even if they did, it’s their fault people lost access to their data. Interesting to see how this unfolds.
- izacus 6y ago
  What kind of legal route is there though? The NASes were explicitly sold without support for btrfs (when I was looking at options, they were clear about that). They explicitly did not allow creation of btrfs arrays and did not expose any settings related to them. To get btrfs, you had to use another btrfs capable NAS and then move the drives over to use that unsupported functionality (which was, again not documented and clearly marked as unsupported) and this patch has now removed a module that allowed for accidental use of that unsupported functionality. What legal grounds do you have here?
  - makomk 6y ago
    A few people seem to have confirmed this isn't actually true - at some point, it was possible to set up at least some of the affected NAS devices using btrfs via the standard GUI on the device. It's possible there were some intermediate software releases which disabled that but still allowed existing btrfs volumes to be used.
  - watt 6y ago
    Sue them for damages and see what sticks. Causing data loss like this is inexcusable. As a customer in Germany I sure hope the consumer protection agency (Verbraucherzentrale) could make them sing.
    - op00to 6y ago
      Way too technical, will never get anywhere. Have better backups and don’t play cute games with important data storage.
      - 6y ago
chrisandchris 6y ago
Is it? They explicitly did never support the fileysystem on the mentioned device and it was only possible because of a bug in their implementation. I don‘t want to be on any side. But is it wrong to fix a bug?
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  Seems like it was a marketing bug ("spec says: only provide this feature for people who paid us more money", implementation says: "everyone gets this feature"), but the "fix" is for the affected people to move everything out of the affected devices, reset them, and copy the data back.
jnxx 6y ago
Is there any technical reason why it is not supported? Also, just for curiosity, and without condoning what the company is doing, is there a good reason to use btrfs for a device like that? I was thinking that good filesystem repair facilities are important once you store a lot of data, and btrfs is inferior to ext4 on this? I find btrfs is fantastic if you have, say, a bunch of Yocto images, or a large video you are working on, and you want to quickly create and erase snapshots of many gigabytes of data, but what is the advantage here?
- lovedswain 6y ago
  > Is there any technical reason why it is not supported? No familiarity with these devices, but there is at least a slim chance if it was an embedded device, they needed the flash or RAM for something else. Seen this happen elsewhere before
- dosenbrot 6y ago
  We already store a lot of data at home. And ssd and hdd storage has sometimes read errors. With terabytes of data we come across a handful error s per year, most of them will nobody notice. I use btrfs everywhere I can and see sometimes errors, most times on heavy written files like databases(sqlite files) or virtual harddisks, sometimes even pictures or logfiles. Even without RAID you could restore the file from a backup (If you try to backup a broken file, the computer won’t let you).
- op00to 6y ago
  Not enough RAM, possibly the CPU they chose wasn’t fully tested.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  These "j" devices have like 512 MB of RAM and an ARM CPU. I believe the devices they do support BTRFS on all have 1-2 GB+ RAM and x86 CPUs.
  - brnt 6y ago
    Then how come it did work before? BTRFS as used in DSM is not particularly more memory intensive than EXT4 (which is why it did work before).
birdyrooster 6y ago
Legal ransomware. Nice.

rodgerd 6y ago

That is not the context I have in my head for DSM.

pengaru 6y ago
diamond star motors?
- rincebrain 6y ago
  I would hypothesize that the poster, like me, thinks of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"
- exporectomy 6y ago
  You can get an idea of what people think of by Googling. All but one of the first page of results for DSM is the same thing. None of them are what this article is about.
leemcd56 6y ago
Right? I was thinking, “What does the DSM, a medical manual, have to do with hard drives?”

amanzi 6y ago

That's awful behaviour! I've been researching NAS devices and until now, Synology has been on my preferred list. Reconsidering that position now - I've never heard of a company breaking something so significant with a minor version upgrade and without warning.

sjansen 6y ago
I’ve been thinking it was about time to replace my current Synology device, and until seeing this was planning on sticking with them. Now I’m hoping to see recommendations for an equally low maintenance replacement in the comments.

justapassenger 6y ago

Wow, this beyond unacceptable and borderline illegal. Even tho I’m very happy owner of Synology, my next NAS won’t be it for sure. What are good alternatives for home usage? QNAP?

infogulch 6y ago
TrueNAS?
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  I built a 6 disk TrueNAS Raid-Z2 box two years ago and though it was inconvenient to build vs buying something off the shelf, TrueNAS has been excellent. Does what it says on the tin and continually improving with each release. Their cloud sync and UPS functionality have been great (flaky power around here). Haven't dug into the TrueNAS' ZFS pool/snapshot management and jails management (FreeBSD's containers) functionality, but both are compelling once I get time and a good project for them. The NAS performing so well has me itching to upgrade to 10 gigabit ethernet around the house once prices come down a bit. Also I ran the OS off mirrored thumb drives until recently. That was pretty nifty.
- mwambua 6y ago
  I've been thinking about going down the TrueNAS route (the TrueNAS Mini series looks really nice), but it seems a little expensive. Is the extra cost worth the convenience of having a machine that you know will stay compatible with FreeNAS?
  - acidbaseextract 6y ago
    Here's a detailed review that answers that question: https://www.servethehome.com/ixsystems-truenas-mini-x-zfs-nas-review/ https://www.servethehome.com/ixsystems-truenas-mini-x-zfs-na... (the video linked there is also good) On page 5 they tally it up as a $400 difference vs building your own.
    - 6y ago

jordemort 6y ago

Wow, OK, I'll never buy anything from Synology.

qsi 6y ago

Ouch, this is terrible. I have been happy with my Synology NASes over the last decade or so, and their tech support, but this really, really, rubs me the wrong way. I am not affected by this act of deliberate vandalism, but Synology's reputation has been very seriously tarnished; this is close to the worst possible thing you can do as a storage provider. I cannot in good conscience recommend their products after this. Very disappointing.

izacus 6y ago
Maybe you should actually read about what happened before throwing judgements? You had to specifically workaround using another Synology model to get into this state.
- callmeal 6y ago
  That's not true. I have a j and remember seeing the btrfs option when creating my volume. I remember it because I was not familiar with that file system and took the time to read up on it. Decided on ext4 anyway because it's what I was knew. So at least from my POV, the UI did allow creating a volume and let you get into this state.

rhodozelia 6y ago

Crap like This is why I don’t apply updates to my own laptop or the power stations I work on. If a system is working properly the last thing I want is changes I can’t audit. Keep them off the internet and it is amazing what works can continue working in the same way. I would have way more outages, breakage, and features gone missing due to updates than missing out on “security patches” and getting targeted by hackers

tedd4u 6y ago

I bought a DSXXX+ instead of a DSXXXj last year specifically to _get_ btrfs based on this https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare/DS220+/DS220j https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare/DS220+/DS220... I guess at some point they forgot to turn the feature flag for btrfs off on "j" models and now they are "fixing" that? Seems doable but with a lot of communication & control for customers and at a very minimum it should go read-only. Super bad for their brand and their customers. Synology users, consider disabling automatic DSM updates. I have mine set to email me when there's a new version. Works fine.

katbyte 6y ago
Generally should always disable auto updates
vetinari 6y ago
No, it was never possible to create btrfs volumes on the j-models. What was possible, was to put the drives into plus model, create the volume, and migrate the drives into j model. Even migrations that are not supported are pretty much possible. Or were, with the uodate not anymore.
- duckfang 6y ago
  Wow, the bots are out in full force on this thread. I've seen the proof on twitter and elsewhere it was 100% an option in the GUI. Enough of your gaslighting, Synology.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    Yeah, bots, everyone who doesn't subscribe to hivemind or doesn't join the mob is a bot, sigh... I can show you similar screenshot. Does not make it genuine. I used to own a value series Synology NAS, and it was not possible to create btrfs volume. For extra fun, it was also possible to create only 32-bit ext volume (i.e. limited to 16TB; if your pool had more, you had to create separate volumes) and it didn't support some ext4 features, so you had to be very careful when creating volume on external device.

paulmd 6y ago

Don't use btrfs. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else. It's not battle-proven or well-maintained, so from a long-term stability standpoint why would you ever want to use it in the first place? kidding not kidding, this was linus's non-sequitur when people complained about deliberate kernel breakage (relicensing of kernel symbols) to prevent interoperability, which I think is apropos in this situation of deliberate breakage. "You shouldn't be using this in the first place, it's not a good product, just migrate your data to use ZFS, ez, next question plz". Pretty straightforward solution, you must agree ;)

j16sdiz 6y ago
Yes, but they disable btrfs in firmware upgrade, without providing any ways to migrate the data.... This is not good customer experience, don't you agree?
lathiat 6y ago
The problem is nothing to do with btrfs itself, synology intentionally disabled its usage on specific models in a firmware update (supposedly because it wasn't supposed to be enabled in the first place - but had let or allowed people to do so for some time).
- paulmd 6y ago
  And there was never a problem with ZFS apart from the kernel team intentionally re-licensing symbols to block ZFS once they saw the ZFS team using them ;)

sliken 6y ago

Seems a rather flagrant disregard for users/customers. The number one priority for any NAS is to never lose a user's files. So what's a good alternative, preferably with ZFS support.

xoa 6y ago
TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS but got a rebrand). Built around ZFS and FreeBSD, it's a really solid and more focused NAS product. DSM has more general features like their whole surveillance software and such, but with a touch of irony NAS for important data is the main thing I didn't ever trust Synology for given the lack of ZFS. TrueNAS can do some other stuff but primarily it's about doing NAS right and fast, and if you want something dedicated to that role and more turnkey (obviously you could just set up any system with Linux and ZoL or FreeBSD naked and NFS yourself) it's well worth a look. It's BSD license, and iXsystems is the primary developer behind it. They do offer some of their own hardware, so you can get a similar "commercially supported buy and turn on" experience to Synology if you'd like, though I don't think the value proposition from them right now is the best for home users or certain SMB. But it's there. And unlike DSM there's no workarounds needed to run it wherever which is another huge tick in its favor IMO. With something as critical as a NAS I don't mind paying a company for support or hardware, but lack of official easy exit options makes me nervous. For reasons like, well, this?

bartvk 6y ago

Although it looks bad, I'm actually curious how many people turned this on. I have barely any experience with Synology; when you start using one, does it actively ask you to use btrfs?

izacus 6y ago
Not on the models listed, since they did not support btrfs on j models at any time.

ac29 6y ago

Since it seems like some folks are responding to the headline here, not the actual article: Btrfs was never supported nor advertised to be supported on these lower end devices. But, it seems like if you created the btrfs drives on another device that did officially support them, you could then import them onto the unsupported hardware platform. Still, its a bad look for Synology. Seems like the lack of btrfs on the lower end devices was merely artificial product segmentation, not an actual hardware limitation.

matkoniecz 6y ago
From comments: > I set up a new device and the DSM software itself gave me the possibility to create a BTRFS volume from scratch. > (...) > It was there, for over a year, and now my data is kept ransom by Synology because they decided I need to buy an upgraded model.

throw4738 6y ago

Stupid question: Does dedicated NAS have any advantages for power user? Buy some cheap Ryzen box, stuff it with harddrives, install Centos and forget about it....

rfoo 6y ago
For engineers with enough time (and able to do troubleshooting), no, no advantages. For everyone else, they do have advantage, most thing you wanted is 1 click away, including something tedious for average "power users", like "using btrfs safely with RAID-5-like disk array" (so that you can take a snapshot of your drive) mentioned here.
jbverschoor 6y ago
It's actually very user friendly.. You can buy a DSM license to install on a normal machine
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > You can buy a DSM license to install on a normal machine Do you have a link to a licence sales page?
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    I'm quite positive I've seen it for custom hardware.. but it seems VDSM is only available (officially) for Synology devices. https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/VDSM_License_Pack https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/VDSM_License_Pac... I know xpenology uses the official software, but I'm not sure if that is legal.
jnxx 6y ago
Electrical power consumption is a point worth looking at.

lathiat 6y ago

What a stupid change. They claim support can help temporarily, but still. Let's assume for a moment they want to go ahead and disable this accidentally enabled feature, OK, but they should have changed it such that - On existing installs: You could mount existing volumes, but not create new ones - Start showing a warning to users asking them to migrate - If they are desperate, on new installs, you could potentially disable mounting existing volumes or at least and a stern warning. (The downside is for example, if your NAS died, you got a new one, migrated the drives, you can't access them again. So this is a hit and miss idea, depending on how keen they are to push disabling the feature) The good and bad news is that in all liklihood they didn't intentionally brick existing users but instead some braindead engineer went "oh that's not supposed to be enabled it, let's disable it" and didn't think about or realise how it would affect existing users until it was rolled out. Good because less malice, bad because they should ideally have smarter engineers reviewing such things.

adwn 6y ago

What's my best option if I want to buy a compact, energy-efficient NAS on which I can install Linux? I just want the hardware, and not pay for the vendor's crappy, inflexible software.

mnd999 6y ago
I got a Helios64. It's a little rough around the edges but it works. Also runs FreeBSD.
- tremon 6y ago
  That looks nice! I see the HDD trays are secured with screws though, does it support hot-swapping disks?
  - mnd999 6y ago
    Yes, I've certainly done it. The slots are pretty stiff so you don't massively need the screws - I didn't put them in until I was sure everything was assembled and working correctly.
tremon 6y ago
I don't think there's many options left. I still have a QNAP TS-419P here running mainstream 5.10 kernel (it's no longer Debian since they dropped support for it), but I don't think newer models are as easily reinstalled with a custom distro. A custom-built mini-ITX machine or a Proliant Microserver would be my next recommendations. But they're not nearly as energy efficient as a consumer-grade NAS.
- jnxx 6y ago
  > But they're not nearly as energy efficient as a consumer-grade NAS. I agree that over multiple years, electrical power becomes a substantial part of the cost (and also the environmental footprint). Small ARM systems with sufficient memory and fast interfaces are perfect for that.
6y ago

chx 6y ago

I wonder, can they be sued for this...?

izacus 6y ago

The title is hugely misleading though - the j model documentation was always very specific that they can't support btrfs and you could never initialize the array into that mode. (At least it was when I was buying my Synology - and opted to + model which specifically supports it. This is the list devices Syno has with btrfs support: https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/Which_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...) The RAID array had to be moved from another device to work. Running your RAID array on a device that explicitly doesn't support it feels like a really risky behaviour.

wasyl 6y ago
They still should've handled it differently. Show a warning to the user encouraging them to migrate, give a reasonable window before the feature is actually disabled, and don't let the users upgrade to a version which will break their storage. Synology made a mistake which they admit: > DSM incorrectly allowed administrators to migrate from a BTRFS-capable device and utilize previously created BTRFS volumes on the affected devices And they're punishing users for it
- izacus 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the crappy part. My intuition says that they didn't deliberately plan to remove it and it was a side effect of some firmware update cleanup.
brnt 6y ago
What is the reason it cannot be 'supported' anyway? It clearly was possible. BTRFS has been mainlined for nearly as long as EXT4, and incurs no particular overheads compared to EXT4.
- izacus 6y ago
  Whatever reason they chose to not support btrfs on their cheap ARM models. Might be stability, might just be pure market segmentation.

wasyl 6y ago

This is absurd, how did nobody in charge realize that a storage/backup device which intentionally renders the data unavailable after any update, not just a patch, is absolutely crazy? And now I'm anxious to update my DS920+ which it seems is not affected by this change but am I willing to risk _any_ updates at this point?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisLomont 6y ago

NAS users do things explicitly not supported, working around built in enforcement in some cases. Then, when Synology blocks the unsupported actions to prevent having even more things to check and test, users complain. It may be no more nefarious than some thing they did want to add would create more problems if they left these holes in the code. These actions were always unsupported. It's like complaining using unpublished APIs does not work in future versions. It's also surprising how many people, likely not even Synology NAS users, misread the article, and jump into full outrage mode.

callmeal 6y ago
>These actions were always unsupported. That's not true. At one time, their DSM gave you the option of creating a btrfs filesystem when setting up from scratch. It may have been "unsupported" but their own setup process allowed you to continue.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  Are you sure? Sounds like on here and on Reddit people were creating volumes outside of the affected devices or DSM and mounting them on the affected devices. For example, [1] "From my reading, you could never take new drives, stick them in a budget Synology NAS and get BTRFS. The thing is, you could set up those new drives in a higher end Synology NAS, then stick them into a budget Synology NAS and it would work with BTRFS enabled." This type of comment seems repeated in various outlets. Have you personally created a btrfs filesystem on one of these 5 affected devices? I've bought Synology NAS for a long time. Each time I buy one for myself or others, I read the spec sheet and specifically buy one that supports btrfs. It's clearly listed for each model what it supports. If it is as they state, this unintentional bug was allowing people to do things that are not validated to run reliably, then leaving the bug unfixed is also a bad idea. Relying on bugs to do your work is a bad plan. This shows why. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/mqks2q/the_latest_dsm_update_makes_btrfs_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/mqks2q/the_latest...

runfalk 6y ago

I've had a less than stellar experience with their support too. I'm the author of a reasonably popular WireGuard plugin (https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard) and in the next DSM version they are basically breaking all kernel module plugins without a migration path. A kind user has found a workaround and made a PR, but Synology have no interest in helping out with this (https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard/issues/66#issuecomment-755716035 https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard/issues/66#issu...).

taffit 6y ago
I'm terrified reading this, as I've set up your wonderful plugin not long time ago and it is working flawlessly. Very bad, Synology, very sad ..
- runfalk 6y ago
  Glad you like it! Don't worry too much as we currently have a workaround. Their SDK still allows us to build kernel modules but the installation experience now requires manually switching the package post installation to allow root access . This of course assumes that Synology doesn't remove this option before DSM 7 is released.
tw04 6y ago
Reading that it's pretty obvious they're preventing modules to try to kill of XPEnology. Sometimes Synology baffles me, the users that are part of the XPEnology project were never going to be paying customers anyway, and they seem to go to extraordinary efforts to try to stop them. The "this is for security reasons" is just silly, none of the exploits they've been hit by to date that I'm aware of utilize or require inserting a kernel module into the system. And if they have the infrastructure to sign modules to allow insertion, they could extend you whatever signing they utilize. It's not like a nation state actor couldn't hack Syno corporate and get access to signing keys if they were after a targeted attack...
paws 6y ago
Do I understand this right, DSM v7 intends to take away root access in some way? Ugh. Another negative to add to the list. For me Synology has mostly been a disappointment, I'm sorry to say. Seems their software has been generally in decline for a while. DSMv7 was delayed over a year ago [1], and now they don't expect to ship until summer 2021. v7 doesn't seem to bring anything interesting to the table IMO, and now they want to take away root? Meanwhile the only thing I saw from v6 updates was a request for spying/telemetry [2]. Wanted to like Syno but it's too locked down, too expensive, too annoying. My position [3] hasn't changed from last year - I don't see myself buying a Syno product again, nor recommending them to most of my technical friends. [1] https://www.snbforums.com/threads/dsm-7-preview-delayed-until-q3-2020.61798/ https://www.snbforums.com/threads/dsm-7-preview-delayed-unti... [2] https://imgur.com/a/Yzgw7hq https://imgur.com/a/Yzgw7hq [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738360

tyingq 6y ago

The most constrained thing on these models seems to be RAM. The listed model all have either 512MB or 1GB RAM. Is that the limitation being cited as a problem for btrfs?

eecc 6y ago

Meh, this and all processes running as root I might just nuke the native OS and just use a Linux distro. Any suggestions?

Arubis 6y ago

For anyone else confused, in this case DSM is DiskStation Manager. (I initially thought it was diagnostic criteria.)