Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

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TaylorAlexander

> Buy a Synology DiskStation

I did that, and I have to say it does NOT play with linux very nicely. I had to change the UID and GID on my desktop for my default user and all of my files because Ubuntu starts with UID 1 and Synology starts with UID 26, so after you figure out how to mount the disk as nfs it says you don't have permission to access it (because your UID does not match the UID of the device). Solving this was one of those problems where you go back 10 years and so many people have posted forum posts and the answer was always some weird hack, and Synology has never fixed it. Changing the UID of my user on my desktop was the easiest hack. Then I installed another OS to dual boot and had to change the UID for that one too, so I could access my files, and somehow the "easy" NAS option has made me jump through lots of hoops.

Turns out self hosting is not easy even when you buy a Synology.

Your choice of NFS is the issue here. I use SMB (with one or two shares where I remap UIDs and masks), and it has worked well for nearly 15 years across Linux, Mac and Windows clients.

I believe I tried both and had issues with SMB too. I found it all very frustrating. I bought a nice NAS. I bought a bunch of drives. I hooked it up and I expected I would be loading on files quickly. But it took all evening to get anything working. I tried SMB and NFS and I recall NFS was easier to get connected, but then I had the permissions issue, which took another couple of days to sort out.

I just did not find it plug and play. It took a lot of messing with it. And I am a relatively experienced linux user!

Sorry to hear that, that's frustrating.

For some anecdata, my Synology has always played perfectly with a vast assortment of Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS for many years, even a Chromebook!

I legitimately don't remember a single error, or ever having to do any debugging around supported services (obviously my own services and dockers have been a bit more involved)

I use SMB though

That seems weird you’d need to have the same uid/gid on both sides of a nfs connection.

I’ve been using nfs for years and apparently just got lucky because I only ever have one user on every machine I use.

Even my crazy hacked together Debian running WD My Book Live (or whatever it’s real name is) has given me zero problems over the years.

Not knowing anything about NFS but seeing that it supports ACLs, I wonder if your solution of changing account UIDs has something to with performance.

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