BangBits

Modding Note that the following covers the DS211+ device, which is characterized by being based on the Marvell Kirkwood mv6282 ARM core (1.6Ghz version of 1.2Ghz mv6281). AFAIK the content of this blog entry should be equally applicable to all DS211 variations, but you should consult the Synology wiki for your device to be certain. While quite feature rich out-of-the-box, developer types will likely want to make their NAS do even more, either out of a real need or just to tinker. For instance, I eventually plan to connect my USB weather station and generate live charts. Because of the modding desire, Synology has a faily comprehensive wiki about the subject. To make a long story short, ease of modding is greatly assisted by the possibility of installing Optware package manager. Installing Optware Optware (ipkg) is an online package system a la what you may know from Debian/Ubuntu. This makes it easy to locate, install and uninstall compiled binaries (*.ipk) through the command...

Having recently purchased a new NAS device , as well as upgraded network cables in my house to cat6 (1Gbps), I started wondering about just how fast and healthy my network setup was. Are all cables in order? Are any of my switches a bottleneck? Any particular slow endpoints? performance challenged There are of course commercial software to assist in this, but after having compiled and loaded up a bunch of Linux software onto my small NAS, it was only natural to give "iperf" a try. It's a small open source client-server utility you start in listening mode on one device, and in transmission mode on another, and have it transfer a bunch of random data over TCP. You can obtain iperf from sourceforge , from your Linux package manager or just Google for precompiled binaries if you are lazy. Simple unidirectional test The process is simple, log onto the receiving device and run iperf in listening mode, in the following case it's my Synology NAS: NAS> iperf -s -p 5...