Hello there,

I’m a newcomer to the synology world (although I know my way around GNU/Linux boxes) and I feel that I could use some help because all the shiny features and screens of DSM confuse me a lot.

1- I have a remote webdav server which I want to sync bidirectionally. I finally got that to work using the “Cloud Sync” app, and the files are replicating into my home folder. Within this folder, I have a “Holidays” photo folder which I would like to make available to my smart TV over DLNA, and ideally to the “Photos” app, is there a way to do that? I resorted to SSH into the DS to create a bind mount between “Holidays” and /volumeXYZ/photo/ but the only photo I can see over DLNA is the dummy I uploaded from DSM and messing with permissions doesn’t seem to help.

2- I have a remote server from which I want to rsync periodically to back-up a collection of music files, and, similarly those files should become available over DLNA and to other users of DSM. “Active Backup for Business” seems decently featured, it even lets me pick a destination folder, which I specified to be “/music”. And now it happily created a mess of what appears to be temp/lock files and config within /music.

In general, what brought me to buying this nas was to have an off-site backup of a server which could double as a media server at home using the same data. So far this experience has been exceedingly frustrating.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    For 1, I can bind mount then see the photos in DLNA with no issue:

    mount --bind /volume1/homes/xxxxx/Holidays /volume1/photo/Holidays

    Then do a re-index, works for me.

    (Note: I am still on DSM 6.2, but this method lets my DS Photo see the pictures too not just DLNA)

    • @u_tamtamOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Interesting! I guess I’ll have to figure out why this isn’t working for me.

      Edit: eventually I found out that I need to explicitly add the bind mount path to the list of directories to be indexed! For some reason, indexing does not recurse into mounts

      Also, I doubt that synology had envisioned that SSHing as root, simply to make some backed-up content available elsewhere, would be the go-to way to do it. There must be better ways to do that, right?

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        IIRC the built in tools let you specify different folders to be photo folders. But they don’t let you pick anything under homes. So you will have to resort to bind mounting if your photos are in one of your homes folder.

        • @u_tamtamOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          OK, thanks. Is there a UI/tool for bind-mounting? I feel it’s a dirty (though effective) workaround that bring its own problems and dirty workarounds (to make the mounts reboot-proof is more stuff to worry about, etc)

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Not that I know of. I have had my mount bind command there for years and never had a problem.

            There are different ways of making it survive a reboot, and I use the method based on this (I actually have a bunch of startup scripts, so below is just an example of what I would do for mount bind : https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/17/post/88713

            #! /bin/sh
case $1 in
        start)
                        mount --bind /volume1/homes/xxxxx/photo /volume1/photo/yyyyy
                        ;;
                stop)
                        echo -e "Nothing to stop..."
                        ;;
esac

            Place the shell script at /usr/local/etc/rc.d

            I guess you can use DSM’s task scheduler to accomplish the same thing, although I am not sure if then the mount bind will be done soon enough before media server is fired up.

            • @u_tamtamOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Any reason to prefer that to putting it in /etc/fstab? Also, it looks like my DSM has systemd, so, progress, I guess :)