SmallNetBuilder

Setup

Synology ships the CS407 with a CD that contains both a PC and Mac version of the Synology Assistant (Figure 6). Since the CS407 lacks an LCD information panel such as the Buffalo's TeraStation Pro 2 and Infrant NV+ have, you'll need to use this utility to find the CS407 on your local network. Both versions will discover the CS407 on your network and will let you click on a "Manage" button that takes you to the web browser interface, which is on port 5000 (Figure 7).

Optionally, secure management via SSL is available on port 5001. The PC version will also let you "map" a drive, install a printer, and install the Windows-based backup and download redirector software.

Figure 6: Synology Setup assistant discovers the CS407 on your local network.

Figure 7: Synology Login screen. Addresses for the photo station and web station are shown on the home page

Feature Tour

Once logged into the CS407, the user interface is virtually identical to the UI found on the CS406, so I won't duplicate those screen shots here. The menu structure is arranged with menu items along a vertical tab to the left side of the screen. Sub-menus corresponding to the menu selected appear across the top of the user interface.

I'll highlight each menu item briefly.

• Information – This is the landing page after login. The home page has a management site map, shows summary information, status info, access to system, connection, backup logs, and current connections.
• System – This menu tree lets you configure your LAN settings, NTP time synch configuration, power management, email notifications, and restore/upgrade the device.
  Energy conscious users will be happy to know that the CS407 supports hard drive spin down (range: 10 minutes to 5 hours in pre-defined choices). You can also configure email notification for up to two email addresses. Unlike the TeraStation Pro II, the CS407 does support SMTP authentication. However, there's no "trigger list" of events that will send an email. I guess you just have to trust that Synology is notifying you about the right events.
• Storage – Here you manage your hard drives and RAID configurations, manage Volumes, and create/modify shared folders. After your drives initialize, you must first create a volume before you can create any shares. The CS407 creates shares for music, photo, video, and web when you enable their respective services in the network menu.
• Privileges – This menu lets you create users and groups and assign either user or group rights to shares that have already been defined. By default, all newly created users are automatically added to the group "users." This group has RW rights to Public. There is a "special" predefined user—Anonymous FTP for use in setting up FTP services.
• Network Services – The menu you use to start/stop FTP, Web services, Multimedia and iTunes services. There are a couple of important notes about two of the sub menus:
• Win/Mac OS – This tab lets you set either the workgroup or the Domain name, and for (really) legacy Macs, enable AppleTalk. This sub menu also lets you enable or disable CIFS database optimization operations. Tim Higgins posted an excellent backgrounder on Opportunistic Locking ("oplocks") that's well worth reading.
• FTP services – The CS407 supports enabling/disabling anonymous FTP. In addition, passive mode is supported using default port ranges or user defined ranges. You can also restrict upload and download bandwidth on a per connection basis. IP auto-block will automatically block IP hosts who have repeatedly failed to login.
• Backup – here you back up system configuration settings, perform local backups to attached USB drives or set up backups between other Cube Stations. This is very similar to Buffalo's network backup between LinkStations and TeraStations.
• External devices – manages external USB devices (disks, printer or UPS) connected to the USB ports
• Download Service – This service enables the CS407 to download files without having a computer turned on. A web-based utility lets you configure downloads. The CS407 will either download based on the time the request was entered into its queue, or will take turns servicing each user's queue. As with FTP, you can restrict upload/download rates.