Management Console
Once you log into the management interface, you are presented with a logically designed screen (Figure 4). The menu is arranged vertically along the left side of the screen. A convenient site map allows you to jump directly to any configuration page.
Figure 4: DS107 Management home page
This management console is almost identical to the one found on the CS407. To avoid repetition, see the CS407 review for a top-level description of the menus. However, I will briefly mention features that are different.
System menu—The DS107 has a PPPoE option that allows you to connect your Disk Station directly to the Internet via a DSL connection. Though this is a nice feature, for security, I’d prefer to have my DS107 behind a good firewall and set up port forwarding on the firewall for web services I choose to enable.
Storage—The DS107 lacks the Volume configuration menu found on the CS407 because it’s a single drive system.
Network—The DS107 has a feature called Ez-Internet. Ez-Internet allows you to configure Dynamic DNS so that your public IP address always resolves to a known domain name. This is useful if you enable web services, FTP, or the Photo sharing applications. Synology currently support only one DDNS provider—DynDNS.org. I hope that they’ll add additional DDNS providers as options in the future.
External Devices—The DS107 supports an external SATA drive via the eSATA interface, so there’s an option to configure it, if attached. The external devices menu also has the added option to configure the "file copy" location of an externally connected USB drive. A press of the drive copy button on the front panel copies the contents of the external drive to your configured location. Note, however, that you only copy to the root of the selected share. (See Figure 5.)
Figure 5: USBCopy allows you to specify where files from an external USB device will be copied
Hands On
The web services, Photo Station 2 and FTP services all worked exactly the same way as on the CS407. However, I would like to spend a little time talking about the media player as well as a new accessory—a Remote Control (Figure 6).
Available in late September, the Remote Control is expected to sell for $39. It will work with all Synology products that have updated firmware.
Contest #29 Results 
