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 Post subject: DSM 4.2 Running on EX495
PostPosted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 3:56 pm 
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Hi guys,

Looooong time lurker first time poster, figured I'd give everyone a heads up and let them know I've successfully installed and am running Synology's DSM 4.2 software on my EX495. If anyone is interested in a how-to guide, I'll post one up. Best place to start reading is to go to xpenology.com.

So far everything (with the exception of the drive lights, and WOL) works perfect. The OS has all the proper drivers for the chipset, the esata port, the usb ports and network card. Performance is great, installed all the DSM packages and they all seem to run fine.

I transferred around 1TB of data, videos and photos, plex runs well, photo station generated thumbnails in a few hours and transcoding on the fly pegs the processor at around 95% with 720p videos.


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 9:04 am 
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I'd be interested in seeing a how-to guide and can do a blog post about it if you write one up. I'm also interested to hear why you prefer the DSM software over WHS. Thanks for sharing your experience!

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PostPosted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:03 pm 
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Please use the following instructions at your own risk. This is meant as a quick tutorial on how to load DSM 4.2 on your EX495 and not a comprehensive how-to on the usage of the DSM software.

The first items you'll need are as follows.

1) A usb thumb drive (anything greater than 1gig should work) as the boot drive
2) For testing purposes, one hard drive that will install the DSM software (it will format and empty that drive)

The following pieces of software

1) Synology Assistant (windows version) http://www.synology.com/support/downloa ... =DS1511%2B
2) Win32 Disk Imager (to install the boot image onto usb thumb drive) http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ Extract that program somewhere on your computer.
3) The Synology boot and pat file (boot image for usb, pat file to install the software onto the server). I'm personally running this version. http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=555. There are three download links, they all contain the same zip file. Inside that zip are two files. DS3612xs_3202-Repack.img and DS3612xs_3202-Repack.pat. Extract those two files anywhere you want.

Instructions.

Install the Synology Assistant on a pc on the same network as your EX495 server.
Place USB thumb drive in your pc and make note which drive letter it is. Fire up win32diskimager.exe. Click on the little folder icon and browse to the DS3612xs_3202-Repack.img file you extracted earlier. Select the drive letter for your thumb drive and click write. Wait till it completes, now you have your boot thumb drive.

Place the USB thumb drive in the back lowest usb port on the EX495, this is important as I found out none of the other ports boot other than that one. Place the spare hard drive in the first bay (lowest) of the EX495.

Fire up the server and wait about 20 seconds, load up your synology assistant software and in the management tab, click on search. If all has gone well so far, you should see the server named Diskstation, click on it and click on install dsm. Before you select the DS3612xs_3202-Repack.pat file from the file browser, remove the usb thumb drive from the server. We don't want it to install the software on the USB drive. After you click the file, follow the instructions and wait for it to install the software. It should take about 5-10 minutes. When it's done, the server will automatically try and restart itself, if you see it rebooting, go ahead and put the thumb drive back in the bottom usb port, otherwise it won't boot up. If you don't catch it in time, just go ahead and power off the server, place the thumb drive in the server, and fire it back up.

There you have it, you should have a somewhat functioning EX495 Synology Server that's leaps and bounds better than any of their atom based systems. Do not try to update the DSM version through the autoupdate feature. The Synology Assistant should let you know when the server is ready to be connected to.


To answer your question as to which I like better. I love WHS 2011 ability to deduplicate client machine backups and it's bare metal restores. I love the apps I have installed on it like Mymovies, utorrent, WebDAV, Routing and remote access, CrashPlan, Plex Server, etc. I especially love Stablebit Drivepool and Scanner for how easy it's made it for me to migrate from smaller to larger hard drives and saved my ass countless times from crappy Seagate 1.5TB drives (you all know what I'm talking about). What I was missing was the slew of mobile apps available for the synology to manage it and also make it fool proof for family to use. I wanted a way to create a photo station, that all family members have access to, can create private folders, and have it actually work properly (could never get rid of the stupid media sharing bug where the web based photo album would sometimes show photos as red x's and only rebooting the server fixed the problem).

That's what the Synology is for, the apps they have are great. The cloudstation, surveillance station, plex server, photo station, all the apps are great. It's as easy as pie to use and makes it a lot more enjoyable to share my content and media. The have iphone, android and windows phone apps to access all your files while on the road and a Dropbox like software that allows me to not have to rely on the cloud. I even installed crashplan on it to have it sync it's content with my Server 2012 essentials server at my office and vice versa.

I'm probably going to keep both running side by side for a while and supplement each other with the different abilities. Hope this helps, I know once this gets out, a lot of people who were wanting to jump ship and purchase a Synology or other devices will make use of the great hardware in the ex495.


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:30 pm 
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I have too many projects I am working on but I would like to give this a try to see how things work out.

Thanks for your detailed post!

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:29 pm 
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You might check this thread Reverse engineering the MediaSmart server hardware to see if it'll work to light up the LEDs. I may try this on the rig in my signature. I've moved to a Synology 1512+ but this sounds like fun.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 6:36 am 
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I've had no luck at all when trying your initial info for putting DSM on a EX495. I keep getting error 5 during the network install. I did get it up once and it had no access to the apps, it kept saying no connection to the packages. Now I do have a modified 495 with a quad core and 4 gig of memory but in reality that should make no difference. Is there any bios changes that have to be made?

Edit1: OK, got it installed - it was a little quirky but had to do with my Domain and windows 2012 essentials security. But still no access to packages even with firewall disabled.

Edit2: OK, got it to get the packages - had to do with DNS server with domain and router - needed the Comcast DNS IP. Actually it's pretty neat, I have Synology Servers and it does beat the pants off them. More testing needed and a way to keep the DSM updated is also a priority.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server


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PostPosted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 9:03 pm 
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erail wrote:
I've had no luck at all when trying your initial info for putting DSM on a EX495. I keep getting error 5 during the network install. I did get it up once and it had no access to the apps, it kept saying no connection to the packages. Now I do have a modified 495 with a quad core and 4 gig of memory but in reality that should make no difference. Is there any bios changes that have to be made?

Edit1: OK, got it installed - it was a little quirky but had to do with my Domain and windows 2012 essentials security. But still no access to packages even with firewall disabled.

Edit2: OK, got it to get the packages - had to do with DNS server with domain and router - needed the Comcast DNS IP. Actually it's pretty neat, I have Synology Servers and it does beat the pants off them. More testing needed and a way to keep the DSM updated is also a priority.


Hi erail,

I did have issues initially trying to install it as well through the Synology assistant. Just like you, I had a server 2012 essentials main server and I have no idea why it was causing some issues installing the original pat file. If the assistant software does not work, as soon as the unit boots up from the usb stick, you can just go straight to the web management console (type in the ip address the server gets from dhcp in any web browser), and it will give you the ability to install the dsm software through the webserver. I ended up taking the box home where I had a tomato router handling all DNS, DHCP traffic and it worked just fine.

Just like you, I have a q9550s and 4gigs of ram in my ex495 and poking around the ssh console, I could see that it recognizes all 4 cores, all 4 gigs of ram, the ahci ich9r chipset, the realtek nic. I think I'm going to try and eventually compile my own kernel and implement the driver for the drive bay lights (just to shut them off, I'm not at the level yet of figuring out how to tell it to work like the original).

I know for the amount of time I've spent getting this up and running, I could have purchased the ds412+ but I refuse to run any atom based processor NAS if I want it to transcode anything. If I want to find an equivalent synology with the power of the ex495 as a quad core, I have to look at one of their enterprise solutions, which has a dual core i3 processor and that box costs $3000 with no drives. The HP brand new cost me around $500 with a 1.5TB drive, the q9550s was $220 and the 4gb of ram was around $80. That's around $800.

I wish HP would just sell this NAS design to Synology, slap a usb 3.0 port on it, make the esata port replicator work with DSM and price it at around $600. Better yet, do what iosafe did with their N2 and license Synology's software.

Or I wish Microsoft would have actually made a WHS app store similar to what synology has done and allow developers to publish to it so we can have a 1 click install of packages.

Here's what's surprising me about DSM vs WHS 2011. On my other EX495 that's running WHS 2011, when I had the os running on a spindle drive, it would take a long time to log into the management tab, around 20 seconds, and I could never get the remote web access multimedia aspect working properly consistently (red x on photos, video transcoding was atrocious, music would work 99% of the time and when it stopped working, I would have to delete a db for it to reindex the collection properly). I figured it just couldn't keep up so I put in an intel x25-m g2 SSD and that made it fly. I still had problems with it indexing properly when I placed media in the video or photo directories, DLNA would just work flaky with the xbox360, the photos would never show up on the photo site, just spent an insane amount of time trying to get it to work as my central media hub with the built in tools. IT's saving grace and always has been it's saving grace is the deduplication client backup capabilities with bare metal restores. There's nothing else on the market like it and a good friend of mine that has 3 kids with their collections of music and videos on their computers, if you took the total of how much media they were all using up, including theprograms and os install, would total around 3tb of total storage, WHS client backup only used up around 600GB just to show you how well it's deduplication worked.

With DSM, it's not all roses all the time but it's saving grace is how fast it is in nearly everything I throw at it. I'm running around 2TB of data on 4 750gb drives I had laying around, it runs a proprietary hybrid raid file system that is scary if it ever goes bad but I've always been a believer in making backups of backups. Original machine -> NAS/Server -> Monthly external USB 3TB drive and daily crashplan backup to my own offsite server (not to crashplan servers). Here's what I'm running on this test server and how much ram it's consuming.

Audio Station (web-based audio server that has airplay and DLNA capabilities to push to any airplay capable device or DLNA capable device)
Cloud Station (Dropbox like sync service)
Couchpotato server
CrashPlan
DNS Server
Download Station
Headphones
iTunes Server
Java SE for Embedded Systems
Photo Station
Plex Media Server
Python
Sabnzbd
Sickbeard
Surveillance Station
VPN Server

All of that is using 513 megabytes of physical ram with about 1TB of data.

What I'm running on WHS 2011

utorrent
AnyDVD
CrashPlan
Mymovies
Plex Media Server
ServeToME
Stablebit Scanner
Stablebit Drivepool
Routing and Remote Access (for vpn services)
Skydrive
WebDAV for WHS
VirtualCloneDrive
TeamViewer 7

That's using around 1500MB of physical ram with around 3.5TB of data.

Transcoding on the Synology seemed to be about 25% faster than on the WHS 2011 box, which again is surprising as I'm running an SSD on the WHS box for the OS and applications where as on the Synology it's running off of the quasi-raid 5 (SHR) pool.

I guess I should stop rambling on and on but just wanted to share some of my experiences with you guys. BTW Alex, I loved your notification software that I purchased a few years ago when I was running WHS v1, it really was ahead of it's time.


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PostPosted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 9:05 pm 
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Last edited by ajafar on Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:45 pm 
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This is pretty good. I have successfully brought up an EX485 running DSM 4.2 with everything working very well. The 485 has a 490 modified bios, quad core Q8200S and 4 gig of memory. Everything works that I have use for. automatic updating of packages and esata. The EX495 that I brought up using 4.2 has only one esata drive it recognizes in a 5 drive case, so the 485 just has the one esata drive it normally recognizes.

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:01 pm 
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I submitted another long post thats waiting to get moderator approved for some reason. I'm glad this is working for you erail, I experienced the same thing with the esata port. I know it was also somewhat buggy under whs 2011 when it came to multiple drives. I tried to power everything off, power on the esata enclosure first, let all the drives spin up then try and fire up the server but it only recognizes the first drive. Oh well, time to see if I can get a USB 2.0 one that should work well for external backups.

Just a note, the boot image has a hard encoded MAC address that presents itself to the network, so without some sort of modification, you will not be able to run two of these units on the same LAN, dhcp will not know what to do, neither will your Ethernet switches. There is a way to edit the MAC address through a Linux boot and a hex editor but that's a little above my capabilities.

I tested out this today and it ran flawlessly.

Run 10gb 1080p mkv movie to my appletv via AirPlay from my ipad. Server transcodes the video to 720p (I have 2nd gen atv), and down mixes audio to 2.0.

Run 4gb 720p movie to roku using plex
Run plex sync to download 2 720p TV shows (that transcode on the fly while downloading) to my iphone.

I did that all at the same time and nothing stuttered. I'm amazed at how well plex works once setup properly.


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 4:19 pm 
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I was disappointed with the lack of port multiplier support with the DSM 4.2 but all I did was swap the drives and the usb thumb drive between the 495 and 485 and the 485 came right up and running with all the data. I had moved 1 TB of data to the 495. I wonder how we can get 4.2 auto updates to these boxes. I agree that the mediasmart running DSM 4.2 really moves the data much better than a normal diskstation. (70Mbs with the mediasmart) I questioned whether we would get auto updates on the mediasmart for packages but that works fine. The smart test doesn't seem to work but that's minor. I have no need for WOL, so that's not a problem for me. I wonder if the Synology expansion boxes will work with this type of setup. This is fun playing with.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 4:25 pm 
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Yes, I'm aware of the hard coded MAC address, so I don't run them together. If I get them running reliably, one will be for NY and the other for FL. Still worried about DSM updates.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 6:11 pm 
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I'm watching this thread closely. I've got both feet in the Synology camp now with a DS412+ running the show. So far, it's been an impressive ride, with just about everything working as good or better than with WHS. I just boxed up my X510 for storage, but I'm thinking I might break it back out to play with this. I had 4 WD 2TB drives that I recently RMA'd and the replacements that WD sent me are AF drives with no backwards capability for WHS v1, but they'd work GREAT with a Synology system!

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 7:45 pm 
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erail wrote:
... a way to keep the DSM updated is also a priority.
I get an email when a new package is available. You can download them and install them manually. Is that what you mean by keeping the DSM updated?

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 9:13 pm 
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TxDot wrote:
erail wrote:
... a way to keep the DSM updated is also a priority.
I get an email when a new package is available. You can download them and install them manually. Is that what you mean by keeping the DSM updated?



It won't work either via the auto update method or downloading the update and trying to install it. The boot image and the pat file have some tweaks done to them to allow them to run on third party hardware. I asked the author of this release if he's planning on updating his releases and he had a concern. He found out that there was a Chinese manufacturer ramping up to produce knockoffs of synologys diskstation using his modified files, and he found a couple already hitting the marketplace. This is fun to play with and possible use it for home, but ill always have my data replicated outside of this environment.

Smart works for WD 2tb red drive btw. Didn't work for an older spin point Samsung drive. Gets stuck at 10%


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