Advice on Network attached Storage??

Well I do pay relatively a lot for my internet access. My network is a ipv4 .248 subnet business class service. Had to lookup BGP. If I understand it, each of my ISP’s have been doing that and I just use my .248. In the process of switching to a new ISP and they are taking a much different approach. Haven’t wrapped my head around it yet. However, until this point, my gateway IP is part of the .248 subnet. Have been told that I am connected in bridge mode but not certain if that is correct. The gateway IP address has always been handled by my ISP. The 5 useable addresses are what I work with. My new IP wants me to have an entirely different gateway address from them. Then I am expected to create the entire .248 subnet within my network including the gateway address that historically has been at my ISP. Assuming I go through with the change I will be doing something that I think is quite different from what I have been doing all these years.

I guess what I am getting at is am I just a crazy old fool? Are there others out here doing the same thing? The way I look at it, as a business, I am paying to be on the internet. If I want to share something on the internet I should be able to and have been doing so for a very long time. If I want to share a picture I share a picture :slight_smile:

This has suddenly stopped working. For years when I wanted to post a picture on this forum I just did so. I see now that I can no longer do that and that my prior pictures no longer appear.

Hmm, I see the picture in your last post. The TH20 clipped onto the tie?

Hmm, I see that in my web server log. Wonder why you see it and I don’t here? Typing this on my mint box and I don’t see it on the forum on that platform as well. In a separate tab I have the same URL and it displays just fine.

Probably due to HTTP Need to go to HTTPS but it hasn’t been much of a priority as it is all static and most modals not loaded. Need to look at moving to a distro that can replace the Mac Possibly run on some kind of VM?

@how crazy is this: Ah, you know what, you’re right. I normally use the latest Firefox on Linux, which doesn’t seem to have any trouble with mixed-mode content. But I tried it on Chromium 89.0.4389.72 for Linux and it failed to show your image, yet it does show the “secure” padlock with no mixed content warnings, so I assume that Chromium is just ignoring the HTTP links. Whereas this is what Chrome on Windows 7 shows, according to Browserling:

Looks like “this is a feature, not a bug”, according to this:

I’m personally not in agreement with everything that Google is doing to try to force everyone’s hand and insist on HTTPS everywhere. At most they could just discreetly change the icon to indicate there is mixed content, and leave it at that. They go to such effort to protect unaware or incautious users from themselves, and then they show those same vulnerable users a nice pretty green padlock on the phishing lookalike banking websites that the scammers correctly configure with full SSL support across the site.

I can understand the sentiment, and I think from the angle of “a right to do so” you’re in the clear. But from a security standpoint, I wouldn’t expose anything to the internet that I didn’t have to in order to function. While you can secure your environment enough that it is less likely to be compromised, there will eventually be someone that can break in. It is much less likely to happen if you have a minimal attack surface.

The only incoming port I have open is for my VPN. If I want to access anything at my home or office it is over VPN (encrypted with long keys).

I don’t host my own images for stuff like this forum since the free hosting options out there (imgur is what I use) are pretty decent, and I don’t have to spend anything for the infrastructure to do it. I don’t have any static IPs at the house… I use a dynamic DNS service called “”Duck DNS”“:http://www.duckdns.org/ to keep track of my IP and the aforementioned VPN for access.

For your business, do you have anything on your server(s) worth protecting? (either for privacy or for financial reasons)

If you do, you may want to weigh the cost of getting a small VPS (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc) to host your content (some of the smaller VPS’s will run a website really well) vs what you are paying now to do it all on your hardware. You’d maintain control of it, but you might save some money… and you’d move the target away from your business directly.

That’s it! Using Brave on both Mac and Mint. (Latest FF crashes on my mint.) Did go back to the ESR and sure enough the image shows in FF.

Have not been worried about a man in the middle attack. Would not occur to me that an ISP would even consider doing that. Turns out that I may have been part of such thing. Doubt they went so far as to do this with my .248 but who knows what they are doing with the WiFi they are running out of the same box. They run that and it is an entirely different network. Read that they were inserting adds in browsers that people who connect to it were using.

Making a little progress. By doing the copy/paste transfers in side by side windows I was able to get drives 2 and 3 loaded with my data. One thing that I was hoping would be an option with this is for me to take one of those drives and plug it into a PC with a sata cable ( like if the NAS was damaged etc) and get acess to the data that way. However when I plug this in where the old HDD the PC doesn’t recognize it. Is it possible to get it to do that?

From windows, probably not. Your NAS likely runs a bsd unix and stores data on the drive in a unix filesystem that windows doesn’t know about.
ETA: synology is linux based, and your data is either in ext4 or btrfs. There are drivers for ext4, but last I checked writes were very slow. And btrfs is more likely, and that’s best left to linux.

Only high end Synology units support BTRFS. Generally only models with a + in the model as BTRFS requires more cpu horsepower than SHR/EXT4.

But yes, one nice thing about Synology is that if you want to replace the unit or upgrade or whatever, you can generally just pull the drives, shove them into a new chassis and be back up and running in no time.

At some point, I’ll probably upgrade to a 12bay unit with BTRFS and 10gb ethernet…

That’s another thing I forgot to mention. If there’s any RAID, LVM, or BTRFS pools, windows access is a big fat “nope.” I’ve never had synology, so I don’t know what their default configuration is, or how much flexibility you have in configuring the low-level disk layouts.

This has really been the most needlessly complicated, expensive, time consuming setup I’ve done in a log time. Basically the only real advantage to this system is that you can pool data and access it from multi PCs. That said, its the function I needed more than anything! To overcome the drive compatibility issue of the NAS I made a backup to an 8TB USB drive that I will just update twice a year when do the SSDs with my programs on them. That way if the NAS dies I still have instant access to the data.
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I appreciate you guys so much. I cant say enough about the level of expertise, and willingness to help others that you all continuously show. Thank you.

Windows tends to be forgiving meaning it won’t delete what it does not copy. The files are likely there somewhere.

I have just about got this all set, but I am wondering, do you guys know how (or if its even possible) to make the second drive in the NAS to incremental copies of the data? Basically when I make an update to an XLS spreadsheet in drive A, the information gets copied to B. But not by making a whole new copy of the entire drive and then deleting the old copy.

I believe this is called a “snapshot” and as far as I know it is possible but I haven’t personally messed with it.

I think that in a 2 bay NAS the drives are typically mirrored (1:1 copy). This means that your storage is only 1/2 the total capacity of 2 drives, but the upside is that if you loose one you shouldn’t loose any data. “RAID is not a backup” is the mantra we repeat in IT.

There may be some NAS manufacturers that provide that option in their software, but I am not aware of any that do. Incremental backups are great for saving space, but you have to have the full backup file + any incrementals to restore the file if something went bad, so that would defeat the benefit of your redundant disk.

If you are wanting file versioning/history for your files so you can go back to a specific version (maybe you make a bad edit and then need the old file?) that is a feature built into windows.

How to set up file history in Windows

My NAS is setup for Raid 1(mirroring). Not really incremental but I just want as little interaction as possible with the NAS so I just leave it as a mirror setup.

I am also wondering if its normal for it to constantly be making noise. It sounds like a little coffee pot under the bench, which I would expect if any files were being accessed, but it basically never shuts up. It seems like when I first got it that it would shut up after a while, so I am wondering if I did something to it. It does have a task manager but I cant get it to give me an “end task” option.

The noise is normal, some hard drives make (a lot) more noise than others, so you may or may not hear the idle noises. But yes noisy drives will sound like you describe.

It also sounds like you want to schedule regular snapshots if you want to keep old versions of files for a while. This is a very good idea to help protect against ransomware. I try to schedule snapshots for 2-3 times a week, and keep at least a months worth. This is because if you get ransomware you may not know it for a week or two, it slowly encrypts your files in the background.

It may be some “housekeeping” of some sort in the background (indexing, defragging, who knows).

When I’d offload dozens of gigamegs of data onto a NAS, it’d go from pretty uneventful and quiescent before, to the flurry of activity when it’s actually doing the copying, and then even when it’s over it’d keep bonking away in the background.

If even let it set a day or more, so I could turn it off when it was all done with everything, but it’d just keep going. Unmount, turn off., etc., then back on, and everything’s okay, nothing wrong. It could take a long while for it to “catch up” and be done.