Synology and External Drives

I was having trouble with my DS211J taking ages, in the order of 2 days, to backup ~1TB to the external drive (A Samsung Story Station 3). Occasionally it would also fail at some random point and require restarting further prolonging the pain.

Initially when I set-up the external drive I used NTFS thinking that I would want to be able to read it from my Windows PCs. After some digging around on the Synology Forums and finding plenty of posts like this one I decided it was time to reformat the drive to native format (i.e. EXT4).

All I can say is wow, the backups are 4 times as quick now.

Synology NAsterisk: Stage One Installing Ipkg and Asterisk

Alrighty, so as you may have guessed it has been a little hectic over here but I am finally getting a chance to start on the glorious plan that I hatched in Synology NAS hosted home Asterisk Server: The plan.

Actually I should probably say I started doing this 3 months ago, before the wedding and all that and have almost zero spare time since then as I am now studying and travelling a lot for work at the same time.

I am basically following the instructions given on the Overview of modifying the Synology Server.

Enabling the CLI
The first step to getting ipkg installed is setting up the command line interface (check out this CLI overview from Synology for more info). There is a handy guide to Enabling the CLI on the Synology forums which has instructions for much older versions of DSM than I have, but no worries it is just as simple in DSM 3. Simply open up the Control Panel and select terminal from the second row. I'd always pick SSH for my systems but if you feel like using Telnet then go for it. Once enabled reboot.

Downloading IPKG
Once you're in via terminal you'll need to download the correct ipkg bootstrap for your Synology system, go to What kind of CPU does my NAS have to figure out which one you need, you can double check your NAS version on the System info page. In my case for the DS211J its the Marvell Kirkwood mv6281 1.2Ghz ARM Processor. This means I need to use http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/syno-mvkw-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh. Once it was downloaded I executed the script using the instructions provided and rebooted the system, then updated as instructed, unsurprisingly there was nothing new to install.

BackupCentre> ipkg update
Downloading http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/Packages.gz
Inflating http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/Packages.gz
Updated list of available packages in /opt/lib/ipkg/lists/cross
Successfully terminated.
BackupCentre> ipkg upgrade
Nothing to be done
Successfully terminated.
BackupCentre>

Installing Asterisk

After ipkg is installed and upgraded it is time to install Asterisk, outputting the list of available packages gives.

BackupCentre> ipkg list | grep asterisk
asterisk - 1.2.24-1 - Open Source VoIP PBX System
asterisk-gui - 2.0.4-1 - Asterisk-GUI is a framework for the creation of graphical interfaces for configuring Asterisk.
asterisk-sounds - 1.2.1-1 - Supplementary asterisk-sounds.
asterisk14 - 1.4.22.1-1 - Asterisk is an Open Source PBX and telephony toolkit.
asterisk14-chan-capi - 1.0.1-1 - capi module for asterisk
asterisk14-core-sounds-en-alaw - 1.4.19-1 - asterisk-core-sounds-en-alaw
asterisk14-core-sounds-en-g729 - 1.4.19-1 - asterisk-core-sounds-en-g729
asterisk14-core-sounds-en-gsm - 1.4.19-1 - asterisk-core-sounds-en-gsm
asterisk14-core-sounds-en-ulaw - 1.4.19-1 - asterisk-core-sounds-en-ulaw
asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-alaw - 1.4.11-1 - asterisk-extra-sounds-en-alaw
asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-g729 - 1.4.11-1 - asterisk-extra-sounds-en-g729
asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-gsm - 1.4.11-1 - asterisk-extra-sounds-en-gsm
asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-ulaw - 1.4.11-1 - asterisk-extra-sounds-en-ulaw
asterisk14-moh-freeplay-alaw - 0.0.0-1 - asterisk-moh-freeplay-alaw
asterisk14-moh-freeplay-g729 - 0.0.0-1 - asterisk-moh-freeplay-g729
asterisk14-moh-freeplay-gsm - 0.0.0-1 - asterisk-moh-freeplay-gsm
asterisk14-moh-freeplay-ulaw - 0.0.0-1 - asterisk-moh-freeplay-ulaw
asterisk14-moh-opsound-alaw - 2.03-1 - asterisk-moh-opsound-alaw
asterisk14-moh-opsound-g729 - 2.03-1 - asterisk-moh-opsound-g729
asterisk14-moh-opsound-gsm - 2.03-1 - asterisk-moh-opsound-gsm
asterisk14-moh-opsound-ulaw - 2.03-1 - asterisk-moh-opsound-ulaw
asterisk16 - 1.6.2.13-1 - Asterisk is an Open Source PBX and telephony toolkit.
asterisk16-addons - 1.6.2.2-2 - Asterisk extras
asterisk18 - 1.8.4-1 - Asterisk is an Open Source PBX and telephony toolkit.
BackupCentre>

I'm going to install version 1.6 and the GUI, I chose 1.6 because some people are having issues with getting the GUI working with 1.8.

Installation was as easy as ipkg install asterisk16 and ipkg install asterisk-gui.

Following that I attempted to start asterisk and was presented with the following error.

BackupCentre> cd /opt/etc/asterisk/
BackupCentre> asterisk -vvvvr
Asterisk 1.8.4, Copyright (C) 1999 - 2010 Digium, Inc. and others.
Created by Mark Spencer
Asterisk comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; type 'core show warranty' for details.
This is free software, with components licensed under the GNU General Public
License version 2 and other licenses; you are welcome to redistribute it under
certain conditions. Type 'core show license' for details.
=========================================================================
  == Parsing '/opt/etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf':   == Found
  == Parsing '/opt/etc/asterisk/extconfig.conf':   == Found
Unable to connect to remote asterisk (does /opt/var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl exist?)
BackupCentre>

I had to start it with asterisk first and then I can reconnect to it... duh!

Following that I made the changes suggested in this awesomely timely post  from the Synology IPKG Forum and now, after a quick reboot, I can connect to the webpage front end.

Now all I have to do is determine the correct password..... :)

Until next time when I configure some extensions and start making test calls.

Synology NAS hosted home Asterisk Server: The plan

Readers of this blog will be aware that I purchased and setup a Synology DS211J a few months back, if not you can check out the series of posts starting with "Finally getting a backup solution". Readers will also be aware that I have started a new job that involves equal parts sitting at home turning into a slob and travelling around meeting clients and working on site. So what I am currently trying to do is optimize my home office and communication solutions.

At home I've got a NodePhone account and it is currently connected to a base station and linked into a few wireless handsets. This works pretty well for a home phone, but none of the handsets have headsets or speaker phone so conference calls are going to be a killer. Unfortunately NodePhone doesn't support multiple registrations in its current guise so simply logging in on the laptop with a headset or something similar isn't going to work.... or is it!

The plan then is to have an Asterisk server log into the NodePhone account and then let my current router and it's inbuilt ATA log into the Asterisk server, plus also I will be able to have other computers and phones logging into the Asterisk server and sharing the line out and also allowing me to register to the Asterisk server remotely and call the home phone as well as make cheap international and other calls. Now the beauty of the plan is that I should be able to install Asterisk on my NAS creating a NAStrisk solution (terribly imaginative name) that means I don't need to have another server on the network and the associated upkeep.

So the stages for this (as far as I can tell are):

1. Install ipkg package manager on the DS211J
2. Install the Asterisk ipkg and its dependencies.
3. Configure Asterisk and make some local test calls.
4. Configure router to let SIP traffic through to the NAStrisk
5. Get NAStrisk connected to NodePhone account and forwarding calls to other sip accounts locally.
6. Connect routers ATA to the NAStrisk so that the WAF isn't affected.
7. ....
8. Profit

Hopefully I'll have the time to get this going in the next week or two, of course I will be posting here as I go, so you can all feel my pain bask in my success!

Most Popular Posts of 2010

Perhaps 2010 is a bit rich, as I only really started this blog in June. All the other blogs out there seem to be doing a most popular posts of the year past so I may as well join the crowd.

Overall I must say I am fairly happy with the traffic that I have been able to generate to the blog. I never really set out with the intent of attracting lots and lots of readers. However I must admit that I get a little thrill when I check the stats and see that people have been viewing my posts.

The most popular post, Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 1, has more views than my entire blog received in the first 5 months of its existence. The second and third most popular are the two follow up posts to the most popular post, Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 2 and Synology DS211J to Samsung Story 3 Backup. This is altogether not too surprising.

What does surprised me a little bit was how much search traffic I receive, indeed most of my site traffic is from google. I guess it shows the importance of getting the keywords and that sort of thing right if you intend to get a lot of traffic into a blog. It also showed to me why there are so many sites out there dedicated to new hardware reviews, it is all well and good for me to try and write about the things that I find interesting, Stuxnet, Memristors, employee performance evaluation and career development and self improvement, but what really pulls new readers into the site is content on new hardware and software. 

I don't see these observations really changing what I post on here very much, I will continue to try and improve my writing style and hopefully find the time post longer posts with more detail and background. I find that I enjoy the writing, but at times struggle to think of good topics to talk about.

Over the coming weeks I'll either post a lot or not much at all depending on whether the mood strikes me. I have some plans for background posts, talking about my Theses for example but I haven't had the time to put them together yet.

Synology DS211J to Samsung Story 3 Backup

After getting my Disk Station setup as detailed in a couple of earlier posts (part 1 and part 2) it is time to complete the final part of my backup solution, which is to get the drive backing up to a external drive, that I will store somewhere else (like in the office). I plan on doing this once a month or so at this stage but probably more often in the future depending on how much data I am adding and needing to back up.

First impressions are that this thing is sexy, but then again it did win a design award so that is no surprise, no fuss nice solid case, with a nice big rotary switch on the front that makes a solid clunk when turned. Love it! Much better than all the cheap enclosures that I have used in the past. If you want to read a review with performance figures and all that stuff you can check out this one from the guys at StorageReview.

Anyway it does USB 3 which for me at this stage doesn't mean much as I don't have anything else that supports it the only question it does lead to is: Do I need a funky cable to connect to a USB 2 host? Well thanks to this easy to follow picture from this page which provides backwards compatibility info.

I still need the USB 3 cable to fit in the socket on the back of the drive but it is fine for me to use an old extension cable I had lying around which is great because it means that I can keep the NAS hidden away in the cupboard but still back up easily.

On the Synology side of things it could be much easier, although I did have a slight mental blank and lose the local backup option. Simply fire up the "Backup and Restore" section of the control panel and select "Create" to create a new back up type. This wil fire up the Backup Wizard.

This presents options to back up the NAS to 3 different destinations.

1. Local Backup: Which backs up to a local USB drive. This is the option that I'm using.
2. Network Backup: Where you can select anywhere on the network as a destination and it uses rsync or rsh to copy files.
3. Amazon S3 Backup: Where you can back up to the Amazon Storage cloud and chose between encrypted or unencrypted storage, with a trade off in backup times with the encrypted option.

Once you select the backup type you pick which folders you want and the destination drive for the backup. You can also schedule the back up, which I will not be doing as I am not sure how often I will be connecting the external drive and will have to do the backups manually.

After the wizard completes you click go and the backup begins. In terms of backup speeds obviously we're restricted here by the USB speed. I am writing this while I wait for the backup to complete, currently it has completed 15 Gb in around half an hour giving a copy speed of a couple of minutes per gigabyte. I am not pressed for time or anything so the speed doesn't really concern me. I imagine that once the first full backup has complete I should be able to specify an incremental backup but I am not sure at the moment. 

Anyway, once again I am quite pleased with the ease of setup and use of this NAS and I have no complaints whatsoever about the external drive. In the future I'll get into setting up external, that is remote, access over the internet of the NAS and using the Torrent client.

Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 2

As promised in my earlier post it is time for part two of my Synology DiskStation 211J setup review, continuing on from where I left off my next thing to do was setup shared folders so that, among other things, I could use Media Rover for backing up and syncing iTunes between my desktop and laptop.

I attacked this the same way that I usually attack these things, poking around in the control panel and seeing what jumped out at me. I suppose I should start with the interface actually, once you have everything setup with the Synology Assistant as I mentioned in part 1 the rest of the administration is done via a snappy web interface. It feels like a simplified linux desktop, which is exactly what it is really, just on a web page. There are four main icons, the file browser, control panel, help and quick start, which just links you to things in the control panel.

I started by setting up a shared folder, just opened up the control panel, selected shared folder and followed the prompts. Then I ran off to try and play with the Media Rover setup. Unfortunately while it did allow me to setup a shared drive I couldn't access it properly, I hadn't even given it thought but I forgot to setup a user, I just set everyone to read only. But then I couldn't access it with the guest account and it seemed stupid to use the admin account.

So back in the control panel I added a user, again just following the obvious prompts from the control panel, and tried to assign permissions to the folder I created. I thought I did it properly but then from my PC I couldn't access it. At this stage I figured I might as well just make a new shared folder and assign the user properly from the outset, that worked straight away. So I guess the lesson from me here is to add your users before you try and do anything else really. The new folder worked perfectly (although the old one hung around on the Windows PC till it was restarted, I couldn't access it but it was still there) and I was able to setup Media Rover and have it sync across to the NAS with out a fuss. You can read more about the Media Rover setup over here ... when I finish the post that is.

My next step was to install and configure the Windows backup tool, Data Replicator 3, on my desktop PC. Installation was a breeze, run it off the disk and you're away in about ten seconds it was all done. Configuration was a matter of selecting a shared folder on the NAS, selecting which files I wanted to back up and clicking go, very straightforward really, at least to do the initial backup. With approximately 55 Gb of data the initial back will take around 4 hours or so, well that's what it told me anyway, but it did go a little quicker than its progress bar would have had me believe.

I also wanted to setup the Time Machine Backup from the Power Book, I had to add another Shared Folder and then in the Win/Mac/NFS setup, under Mac File Service its a simple matter of selecting which shared folder you would like to use, in my case the ingeniously named "TimeMachine" folder. Somewhat annoyingly selecting a folder requires that you restart the network service on the NAS which I would have to wait to do as I am still replicating the Desktop PC. Once I applied the settings my Powerbook quickly picked up the new "TimeMachine" folder on the drive and it was a simple matter of clicking start to get it all working.

I grabbed a power meter from Aldi the other day so I thought I would put it to use monitoring the power draw of the NAS. On power up it power usage peaked at 24 Watts and then settled back to around 15 W when the drives where spinning but nothing else was happening. When copying an individual large file power usage spiked to 16.5 W, when completely idle and no drives running the power draw dropped to 7 W.

In terms of transfer speeds I can't be bothered sitting down and calculating heaps of them, although I am sure a lot of you are interested in that. A 1.28 Gb file transfered comfortably in around 3 minutes and a 55 Gb backup of my Windows PC via the data replicator took 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete. Not the most scientific but I rate it plenty quick enough for me.

I have to rearrange a cupboard to get the system setup in its permanent position and when it is in there I will get it backed up to the external disk as well, the Story Station.

EDIT: I've now got the external drive connected and backing up, you can read the setup info in my new post.

Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 1

So, as you may have seen in my earlier post I've finally gotten around to getting a backup solution in place for my house. Now I don't have loads and loads of crap that I have downloaded, nor do I generate a tremendous amount of data at home anyway. However I do dabble with a bit of photography, have a music collection that has grown over the years and is now spread across 3 laptops and a desktop and I am starting to gather those important documents that you don't really want to lose on drives spread around the place.

So, lets get down to it, here is what my solution will consist of:

• Synology Disk Station 211J
• 2 x Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive
• Samsung 2TB STORY Station 3.0 External Hard Drive 

Finally getting a back up solution!

I got some new toys today from my friends at Scorptec. These are going to form the proper backup solution that I've never had before. I got an awesome deal with them setting up a promo special because I asked nicely on the Overclockers Australia Forums (if you're a member you can check out the special in this post). Here is a list of what I've got:

• Synology Disk Station 211J
• 2 x Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive
• Samsung 2TB STORY Station 3.0 External Hard Drive 

Hopefully I'll get the full review up in the next couple of days.

EDIT: The full review starts in part 1 and continues in part 2 and then in this post about backing up to an external USB drive.