Synology DS216se 2-Bay Entry-Level and Cloud NAS Review

Setup – Users, Services & Files

Users

The first thing we want to do is create some users. We already have the administrator account that we created during the initialization, but we shouldn’t use that for anything else than maintenance. There’s also a guest account by default, but it is also disabled by default.

Creating new users is a breeze and the only information that you need to provide are a username and a passport. You can also add a description and email address for each user as well as send notifications to him about the newly created account.

You can assign the new user to groups right away if you already created some.

And you can also assign access rights to your shared folders during the user creation, that is if we already had created some.

Each user can have their own disk quota assigned on each available volume.

The application permissions are also user based, so you don’t need to worry about users getting access to something on your NAS just because you installed it for just one user or a few select users.

The last things you can change right away is the speed limit setting for the different applications that the user has access to. A really neat feature that can prevent users from hogging all the available bandwidth for themselves.

The Advanced tab on the user page allows you to define a few more parameters on your users such as password settings, and two-step verification.

User Groups

Creating usergroups is the simple way to keep an eye on all your users and manage them in large batches rather than individually. In most cases you’ll have same access settings for a lot of users at the same time and it is simply easier to set those rights for a group rather than doing it individually for every user.

Besides the lack of password setting on the group as each user has their own, the group creating is much the same as the user creation and you get the same options and permission settings.

File Services

Synology DSM comes with all the file services that you could want. The most basic is Samba for Windows and Mac OS shares, but it also support Time Machine for Mac OS and NFS for Linux users.

The built-in FTP client features all the settings you could want, including FXP and SFTP

Within the advanced settings, you find the ability to log the FTP file transfers and set a few more option such as user root directory and anonymous access.

Trivial File Transfer Protocol might not be the newest on the block, but just as FTP it is built on a solid foundation with plenty of support on all sorts of devices.

WebDAV might not be an option commonly used on a small NAS such as the DS216se, but it could come in handy at times and there is no reason to leave it out.

The QuickConnect feature is found under connectivity although I consider it a service too. It allows for easy connection to your NAS from everywhere and every device. It is a lot simpler to set up that an ordinary dynamic DNS service.

You can naturally select which functions you want to enable for the QuickConnect

Connectivity

Normal DDNS services are also supported and there is a whole list to choose from. Which you pick is down to which you want or already use. This is particularly useful if your router doesn’t support the DDNS service that you want to use on its own.

Speaking of routers, you can also configure the aspects of your router that you need from within the NAS operating system and all that works thanks to UPnP.

Detecting and setting up the connection to the router should be automatic for any modern router with UPnP enable. The DSM system will scan and check the settings automatically.

Once it found the router and checked the settings, you can continue to the actual configuration.

Common settings are port forwards, allowing you and other to access specific functions and apps from outside your local network. You can let the DSM do this automatic by application or set the ports manually.

The port forwarding guide is simple, just select the boxes for the apps that you want access to and forwarded by your router.

Shared Folders

Shared folders are the last part of the basic configuration that I’ll show you today and at the same they are the cornerstones of your NAS. These are the folders you’ll access from all your other systems in order to store your files. Create as many as you want, but don’t create so many that you lose sight of some.

Creating a new folder only requires you to specify a name and select the volume you’ll want to place it on. You can select whether you want to enable the network recycle bin for each individual share and you can also enable encryption here.

You can also assign access rights for the new folder to all existing users and groups while creating it, so you don’t need to open yet another window to specify these.