 All right, John, I spent some time, far more time than I cared to yesterday, with my disk station. Synology has announced that DSM7, which is the next version of their operating system for their disk stations, is finally out of its long testing cycle and will be released on Tuesday. So, again, depending on when you're listening to this, it might already be out. It might not be. Their release candidate is out, though, and I figured, okay, well, release candidate, I'm good to go. Usually, I install the beta on one of my sort of alternate disk stations here. I've been busy, so I didn't do that this time, but I did install the release candidate on sort of my alternate disk station. That went fairly well, and then I installed it on my main one. And that's when things kind of went sideways. It works. Like, first of all, please listen to this segment, but my advice is, if you are using any third-party packages, wait. Do not install disk station 7 yet, DSM7. It changes a lot of things under the hood with how packages can be installed. Most of this from a security standpoint. I think, John, based on the knowledge that I didn't want to have to glean yesterday, that's where I sort of landed with it is that permissions and things like that. We saw some of that with DSM6 where they limited what packages could do and how packages needed to act. That got a lot stricter, it seems, with DSM7. And if you look at the Plex threads on this, it's pretty obvious that Plex's engineers are frustrated AF by the moving target of this. I had no idea. I just assumed that because it was release candidate, they were ready for it to be released. I understand that there's going to be some things that aren't quite right out of the gate, but as of three weeks ago, things were still changing and there was some indication, according to Plex, from Synology, that things were going to continue to be changing. And that's not good with one of your most popular third- but first-party packages. Plex is one of the default third-party packages that's included. It would not work for me. I had to go through a huge monstrous exercise to get my distations permissions. It uses ACLs in a weird way and some shares can have their ACLs customized, ACLs being access control lists, like Windows server permissions. Some can have their ACLs customized in the interface, like in the GUI. And some cannot. And for whatever reason, my Plex share is not one of the blessed ones. And so, yeah. So I had to learn all about how to use Sino-ACL control and do it all from the command line and try and beat my head against the wall and then try more. And I finally got it running. It helped from the Plex team. And all of this is available publicly. The conversation I had with them was all public on their forums. I'll link to that so that you can, if you run into any of these problems, you can benefit from it. And then most of, I would say most of my other third-party packages didn't work either. So it's been a bit of a chore, my friend. But it, what? It is good. Like the things that, so that's the bad, that's the warning, Danger Will Robinson. What I do see though, so I'm looking at a summary here of the features, or at least one summary. But they mentioned that, I guess the good news is that they claim now that you can see how much data each package is using. So they've enhanced something in the package management. Yeah. So they claim. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. They've enhanced a ton. And that's the thing is, is like, even just the core components of DSM, like the storage manager is so much easier. Now you actually get a picture of your, your, your thing, you know, your, your distation and you can see what drives are where it, like they've increased the efficiency of the way like SSD caching works. They've added a lot of cloud management stuff, John. They've added this thing called active insight, which is you log into your Synology cloud on at Synology.com and it can tell you like what's going, you have to opt into this, of course. But once you do, it shows you all of your distations and it can, you know, report on, on things for you. You can back up your configuration to send to your account on Synology's cloud. So if there's ever a problem, you can come back down. Synology photos, of course, I can't get it to work for whatever reason it won't migrate my data in because the indexing, the media indexer isn't running properly for me yet. So, you know, don't know why trying to dig into that too. But Synology photos looks like perhaps finally the right step in the evolution that was photo station and then moments. And it seems like now they've sort of combined them into photos. Obviously, I haven't tested it yet, but I'm excited about that. Synology office, which has been awesome anyway, is now like, you know, it sees a pretty big upgrade as does Synology Drive, which is sort of the engine underneath Synology office, but also the syncing engine that we use like, you know, like a Dropbox kind of thing. You can see so much more about from the management side, it's a whole lot more flexible. So there's, there's a lot. I'm probably missing stuff, too. You know, it's like they've put a lot into this, but the third party package thing got. But was there anything else on the on the like the pros side, the good side that you noticed, John, I feel like I'm missing something here. No, again, I think you could, you know, so the storage manager gives you a lot more. So, you know, they increase the performance of certain raid and cashing things like that. But also, yeah, like, like you said, they give you with active insight, they give you a bigger picture. Another thing which I think, yeah, they already launched it. Maybe they enhanced it, but, you know, they're also trying to promote this concept of a hybrid cloud and that they enable this or they make it easier for you to split your storage between your Synology and their cloud service, which is nice. You know, so you, you're, so it's, you kind of have redundancy in that your data is in more than one place. And yeah, and as I, I haven't messed with hybrid cloud yet. You're right. That is, maybe you were able to do it before, but certainly not at this level that DSM seven opens. But what's nice is you can have, you know, all of your data in the cloud and only sink down to your disk station, the things that you locally use regularly, but you have access to it all and you can slip it down. So if you and I, you know, we're in different locations, we each have disk stations, you know, if you're working on one project and I'm working on another, we're both saving it to the, to our share. But I can choose not to download your project locally. If it's going to take up a lot of storage or you're making a lot of changes to it and I don't want to use all that bandwidth or whatever. But then when I want it, I can just go slip it down. It's like, it's, it's like you said, it's the best of both worlds. Like, yeah, I like that. I, as far as third party packages go, John, I am now all in on Docker. I moved, I think four packages from being the Sinnoh community, which is like the unofficial, official repository for third party packages on, on Synology. That's really where you're going to go get those from. Those are what are not up to date yet for most of them. I'll put a link out. They are tracking which are fully capable of running on DSM seven and which are not yet fully capable. And then there's some that they say will never be, but that's very, that's a small number. Most of them are still just being worked on. But, you know, Docker, Synology, Docker has come a long way on Synology and what Docker is for those of you that, that either don't know or haven't used it in a while. Essentially, what Docker lets you do is it's kind of like creating a virtual machine. In fact, it is creating a virtual machine. It's a little, it's like a lightweight virtual machine. You're not going to log into the, like the graphical interface of it or anything like you would if you ran, say, parallels or VMware, you know, Fusion on your Mac or whatever. But it runs inside a virtual machine, inside a container. And what's nice about that is when you change the operating system, like say DSM six to DSM seven, well, the thing inside your container of Docker is still just Docker. And so it all just works. And Synology has made it the user interface for Docker has gotten so much easier. I moved four packages over to Docker last night in less than a half hour, all four total, like probably closer to 20 minutes. It was about five minutes each. It was, you know, download the container and while the container was downloading, the container being sort of the pre-built virtual machine for whatever service you're going to use, I definitely should have done this with Plex. Like that would have saved my afternoon yesterday. I didn't. I wasn't that smart. But I did do it with like ZNC, which is the thing that I used to connect to our IRC server for the chat at live. Mackie.com. That Synology Syno Community package. No, it doesn't work. But I moved, you know, I downloaded the container that has ZNC and all that stuff. And while I was doing that, I moved the data from where the app, the Synology App Store stores it, which is in slash volume one slash app store slash name of the app. So ZNC, I moved that data over to, or copied, I should say, that data over to a folder that I put in slash Docker. So I made slash Docker slash ZNC. I copied that data over. Then once the container was downloaded, I went through and I point, you just, there's basically like three things that you need to do when you're setting up a Docker container. You know, you say launch. It asks you, what folders do you want me to use? And you can find, you can always find some guide online that tells you, OK, well, like for ZNC, the name of the folder needs to be slash config. I'm making that up. I could have that wrong. I don't have it in front of me, but, you know, whatever. And then I say, OK, so inside the container, when it looks for slash config, where is that data actually stored? Well, that data is stored at, you know, slash Docker slash ZNC. That's the file I can touch from the outside of the Docker container, right? So you're pointing inside to outside. Great. Put it there. It's slurped in my configuration. All good. Then you tell it what network ports it's like port forwarding on your router. And I say, OK, you know, if I use port 8251 for ZNC, I want to point 8251 on my disk station to 8251 inside this Docker container. And then sometimes there's an environment variable to set up like if you want to set like time zone or whatever. But that's really it. So it's mostly two things, I think that you, you know, you configure and then the Docker just runs and it's like, OK, great. And now I don't have to worry about it. So highly recommend before you move to DSM seven, move all of your third party packages into Docker containers. And then your migration will be smooth or maybe not fully smooth. I don't know. Do you use Docker a bunch, John? My last experience wasn't very positive because you know, you had to, I couldn't just take a Docker package and run it. That was my expectation is, you know, I double click on it and then it runs and when I tried it, you know, it didn't work because I didn't know the special incantation that was required for, I guess, the command line. Yeah, you'd point it out. You shouldn't have to use the command line at all now. All the things I just mentioned are doable in the Synology Docker graphical interface and you're right. Excellent. Previously they weren't, especially the networking stuff, if you wanted to do like a bridge network or whatever, which is essentially what you want to do with everything and then just port forward, none of that was doable on the in the graphic interface. You had to go to the command line and then it was like, you know, you never remember what you did or, you know, whatever. So, but that's all fixed now. And that's been fixed for a little while, not too terribly long, but like maybe DSM-6, maybe later in DSM-6, they fixed that, but it's great now. Like I said, I moved everything in and I'm going to check and make sure that all my Docker containers are running, but yeah, I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven up and running. One of them is Watchtower, which keeps my Docker instances up to date. So, but, but yeah, it's, it's, it's so much better. And if I'm in the chat room at live.mackykev.com, which it appears I am, then my ZNC Docker is working on DSM-7, so I'm stoked. Anyway, yeah, if you're going to make this leap, be prepared for perhaps like a package to not work for a while, you know, it got to the point. I expected it to be like, okay, you've got to update these packages and okay, fine, you know, whatever. I did not expect it to just say, oh yeah, no, fail, not going to do it. You know, that was when I was like, oh crap. And I was shocked that Plex was one of those. ZNC, that's sort of a weird thing. How many people connect to an IRC and need to do it through a relay or want to do it through a relay? Like that's a little weird, right? But, but Plex ain't weird, folks, that it, it should not be the problem that it is. The big issue is they had to move where they're storing the Plex metadata library, which used to be in a share called Plex, and that's where it is on DSM-6, it needs to move into the package home because of sandboxing. And being able to move that requires lots of permissions that it might not otherwise have. So anyway, that's the underlying issue. And they've been trying to solve it, but it's been like a cat and mouse game by reading the forum since December. And it's been like, okay, we got it working. It's like, broke again. So anyway. Yeah, let's see. Some enhanced security stuff as well. I think they, I see that listed as a new feature. I even have now the security advisor keeps yelling at me that my admin account is admin. Yeah. And I should change that. Yeah. But I see also that they have stuff here as far as like password policy. They make that a little tougher, which is good, I guess. It is good. And you can tweak that stuff, of course, but they've also got a more robust two-factor authentication method that you can use one of their apps with. And so, you know, it's good. I mean, we use it a lot for, you know, business stuff with some of the businesses that I have. So, I mean, it, you know, it's not, like it's a real platform. It's not just, you know, a thing to play with, although it's fun to play with. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, we rely on this for a few of the companies. And so, like, I'm a little bummed that Synology Photos isn't working for me. I think that's a me problem, but you know, the migration should work. Whatever that means. So, I don't know.