I made the mistake and updated my Synology NAS DSM Software to their big new version 7. For some reason, I assumed that the update would go smooth since I didn’t do any fancy things with my Synology NAS except using it as a dumb storage hub. I was never a friend of putting all the things they offer on there without a lot of knowledge how things are going on under the hood in order to fix anything or god forbid debug something.

I bought this thing since it’s made for consumers with a somewhat okay-ish looking user interface, a couple of things to set and configure and with the hopes of not being able to break it as a regular user. Well, even in this mode it broke.

Tasks running as root, not as configured user:

What went wrong? Well, I have two things: One task running daily to download some files, which is configured to run as a different user. I didn’t do anything fancy here, all of these things can be configured through the web interface and even after the update, the script was still in place, and it also still had the correct user set.

So why did I get an e-mail about a failed task running? Well, turns out, DSM 7 just runs all these tasks as root and not as the local user, so I got this error since the root user is unable to connect with a key to my remote server since the key is only available to the other user without specifying an exact path.

How did I fix it? Probably not the best solution, but since this is just so annoying, I changed the script that it would switch to my local user within the script, so it could also be executed as root. Sucks.

NFS shares can’t be mounted:

Next, I have a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy work (haha…), meaning executing a couple of scripts, mounting NFS shares from the Synology to write data to. So one would assume that this is the basic functionality of a NAS, to provide file shares. Right. But, something changed with the NFS configuration and my local Linux user on my Raspberry Pi wasn’t allowed to read data from the share. I could mount it, but were unable to read anything. Why on earth?

Turns out, for whatever reason the NFS mappings broke for my shares and I had to update the NFS permissions for each and every shared folder to map all users to admin in order to make this work.

Again, just a little thing, but annoying. Also, without proper monitoring, things like this would never come up. I don’t think that the target group of buyers for these consumer NAS devices implement things like monitoring to figure out when things break.

I can also just go back and run the whole NFS server and everything else from my Raspberry Pi with a few USB disks attached and run my own raid.