7 ms·

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 d

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.

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.