Tag Archives: technology

Synology DSVideo and mobile devices

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This week I’ve made a few experiments with the video streaming capabilities of my DS411Slim NAS with two mobile platforms: a Nexus 7 (Android) and the Lumia 800 (WP 7.5).
In order to proceed I had to install the beta version on the NAS as a first step, then I was able to connect with the app downloaded from the stores of the two devices.

I only had a handful of old AVI movies to test and it turned out that the native player of both the Lumia and the Nexus 7 were unable to play the format.

On the Nexus 7 it was possible to install VLC and then play the video.
The same possibility is not available on the Lumia making it an unsuitable platform for further experiments.

The app on the Nexus is not able to resume the play from the point where the tablet was suspended and apparently doesn’t support the manual seek.
I’ve downloaded locally the file and VLC seek worked without any issue.

Overall the experience was fairly negative: DSVideo is not yet a mature solution.

OpenWRT on TP Link MR3420: easy and powerful

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The house of my parent’s in law seems to have WiFi gremlins living inside.
Even obtaining a decent signal 8 meters from the router in the past proved to be a challenge.

As a first attempt to connect an old desktop of mine I tried a TP Link WiFi N PCI adapter (TL-WN751ND) with a single antenna (the best that was available in the nearby computer shop): the router signal was detected but connection always failed.

To improve the situation I’ve added a high(er) gain antenna (8db) with an extension cord: signal appeared significantly stronger but connection was still failing most of the time and when successful was lasting only a few minutes.

As a last attempt I decided to convert the 3G router that I already had from the stock firmware to the OpenWRT firmware and use it as a bridge providing ethernet connectivity to the desktop.
Installation was very simple as it worked from the standard firmware update interface of the stock firmware and in about 10 minutes I’ve had the bridge up and running.

Most likely the big challenge is related to signal scattering and the 2×2 MIMO did the needed magic.
Now the connection is fairly stable and I can get the full speed of the ADSL line to the desktop.

A big thank you to the OpenWRT guys.

New Nokia Lumia 800 at home: low satisfaction with WP

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Recently my Nokia E7 died and I was left without a smartphone.

Given the nice feeling that I’ve had with the Nokia N9 I’ve picked up the Lumia 800 handset as the phone construction is very similar and the N9 was not longer available at a good price.

After one week of usage I’ve to say that I’m very unhappy with the phone because of the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system.

Microsoft made something major with WP that makes this OS worthless for me (and for people traveling a lot):
There it is no way I could find to download automatically (or by explicit command) all the email attachments for all the emails in my inbox.
I travel in foreign countries 50% of my time and I’m not always in free wifi coverage: having all the data in the phone up to the last synchronization time is key to make it a good work companion.
The position of MS is that the behavior is selected to avoid risks of infections and to help save bandwidth: I’d agree with the choice if it was just the default configuration but it’s not changeable at all.

BTW there it is people who is complaining about Android downloading attachments they’re never going to read 🙂

I’ll either hand the phone over to my wife or send it back hoping that I’ll get the E7 back from service soon as the physical keyboard is a big deal too for me.

My Nokia E7 died

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Early in the monday morning I picked up my E7 to use it for both phone calls and as a GPS for my trip in Germany and I’ve found a bad surprise.
For no apparent reason it was asking me to insert the USB cable and then to disconnect the device no matter if I had or not something connected.
Acknowledging it was not helping: in a few seconds it was back with one of the two requests.
I’ve tried all the possible combinations suggested in this thread on nokia.com, but nothing worked.
I hope to get it fixed under warranty 😦

December update: I got it back fixed under warranty. Horray!

Vodafone station issue: round 2

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Today I had again issues with the voice calls using the phone connected to the VF station.

People told me that the my voice recalled them the creature of the black lagoon and that Skype voice quality was way better.
It’s very annoying.

I know that my phone is not directly connected to the PSTN but is actually converted to VOIP by Vodafone’s own router, but this should be transparent to the me as is a VF technical implementation decision and not a hack on my side.

What is interesting is that it looks like the issues started after i got the line upgraded from 7mbit/s to 20mbit/s (not really achieved yet)
Tomorrow I’ll do a test with another phone: if I can’t sort this out soon I’ll revert back to the 7mbit/s and save the money extra money of the nominally better and faster line.

If anyone would like to take a test of the 20 mbit vodafone and share the results it’s possible to join this speed wave

UPDATE: on Friday afternoon (October 19th) the line drown in the black lagoon altogether.
No ADSL and no voice at all for about 30 minutes.

UPDATE: on Saturday evening (November 17th) no ADSL again. Vodafone’s reliability is way worse than what I get with Wind/Infostrada.
To make things worse it’s not possible for the end-user to tell to the Vodafone Station to connect at a lower speed in an attempt to improve reliability.

Vodafone station issue

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Today my home network had quite a few problems.
First Vodafone’s station decided that for my VOIP line was ok to abandon me in the middle of a conference call.
It turned out that it was not a temporary issue: the interface was reporting that everything was ok yet I was unable to place or receive other calls.

The hiccup of Vodafone’s device also got my dual wan router confused: even having a second WAN line working fine I was no longer able to access the internet.

I felt positive about the VF Station so I have reset everything else first: the PSTN+VOIP phone (Siemens Gigaset A580IP), the dual wan router (Netgear FVS336Gv2) and the network interface on the notebook

At the end pf the troubleshooting a physical power off of the station was needed to bring the service back.
Quite inconvenient as the device is located in a cabinet and not readily accessible and it’s not the fist time this happened to me.

Firmware upgrade frenzy during the weekend: Nokia N9, Synology DS411Slim, Netgear FVS336Gv2

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The Nokia N9 looked like if it was running on windows 7: over 280MB of updates. Twice.
Hopefully I’m on the most recent version now and, yes, email synch seems to be faster that when unboxed as promised by the update description.

The upgrade of the DS411Slim doesn’t look like has fixed my issues with slow transfer rate from the encrypted volume.
Even worse: I’ve had the time to test with the regular volumes and it looks like they are slow too.
I’ll post more detail on my findings once I’m done with the backup od the encrypted volume and can remove it from the NAS.

The FVS336G was working stable (with the exception of a relevant slowness in managing the WAN interface up-down-up transitions) before the upgrade and seems stable now too.
I decided to give a try at the updated FW (3.0.8.12) : the list of fixed problems in this release was impressing and I was on an 18 months old version (3.0.7-24)

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: DSM 4.0 not helping performance for me

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I’ve written recently about the poor performance writing to and reading from an encrypted volume on my Synology DS411Slim.
In an attempt to improve the bad numbers I’ve decided to take the risk of updating from a firmware that I knew was working for me (DSM 3.2) to a more recent one (4.0)

The interface looks sleeker than the previous one, but unfortunately there it is no improvement at all in writing to the encrypted volume.

DSM 4.1 is available too, I’ll likely give a try at it too as there are no major reports of problems.

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: major negative impact also in reading.

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A few days ago I created an encrypted volume on my DS411Slim and reported a major degradation in writing speed.
I hoped that reading was maintained in the original ballpark, but this is not the case.
12.5MB/s is all I can get and is very bad in comparison with the former 70+ MB/s

Since my first post I did some research and, according to Synology’s own tests, I should get about twice the current speed.

I’ll give a try at a more recent version of DSM (I’m on the stock 3.2) to see if it provides better performance.
I’m usually a bit reluctant to update the firmware of working devices, but the opportunity of getting better performance on the 50GB backups is pushing me in this direction.

Synology DS411Slim and encryption: an unpleasant surprise

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Some time ago I built an encrypted volume on my small nas from Synology and today I did the first real test.
I’m backing up an entire volume with Disk2VHD, a nice free utility from Microsoft’s Sysinternals tools to make online volume snapshots.
I did this in the past several times from the same machine on a regular non-encrypted volume on the same nas obtaining about 37 to 40 MB/s of sustained writing speed.

Given the hardware encryption engine included the nas I was expecting a similar performance with the encrypted volume but this is not the case.
The speed is down to 7MB/S, a sharp 80% loss.
I’m running DSM 3.2
I wonder if this is common/expected or not.
The backup will have to be again a nightly activity until I find a way to get back the high-speed when using the encryption 😦

Update: I’ve had the opportunity to test large reads too and it’s not looking good