core system and security thoughts

[micro]

Hi,

I'm very interested in the NAS Systems of asustor. But i'm a little bit concerned about the overall presentation.
I mean it seems the NAS market of today requires the firms to have fancy UIs, lots of integrated features and such. So there are NAS companies really focusing on these features, more fancy look and a great flashy presentation of their products.
But the first thing for me as a costumer is security. So I want to have the latest core software and components to meet this requirement. Other NAS products especially the big Q do not meet this requirements and use years- yeah years old core stuff.
Perhaps you have even followed the discussions in their Forums.

So what do you think about this? I mean your base OS is new and so I think old Software is no real problem at the moment.
But do you plan to be always up-to-date with your core OS?
Will asustor provide fast security patches?
And also can you provide details about the core system that you are running?
Which versions of openssl, openssh, busybox, afpd, smb,... do you use in your OS?

It would be really great to know such things before buying a new nas =)

Thanks very much!

[Steve@AST]

Hi Micro,

Security and reliability are the most important things that we care about.

if it's necessary to update the service version, we would arrange the update patch in our road map immediately.

we also will keep updating the service version from time to time definitely

below are the service version that we use currently

smb : 3.6.1

afpd : 2.2.4

OpenSSL : 1.0.0e

OepnSSH : 5.9p1

BusyBox : v1.19.3

Linux kernel : 3.1.2

regarding service version above, if you have any suggestion, please let me know.

cheers,

Wall-E

[schumaku]

Thank you Wall-E.

Has Asustor already considered heading to AFP v3 ot get rid of the nasty Apple.double resource files for example?

Regards,
-Kurt.

[micro]

Hi Wall-E

thanks for the quick reply.

Good to hear that you take such things seriously =)

And its very refreshing to see a NAS company being that open to this subject.

No, sorry I can't make suggestions since i'm not that of a linux pro

micro

[Astro]

Hi WALL-E@AST,

I already check ASUSTOR demo page, its GUI is very intuitive, it`s awesome you also have ASUSTOR college. Since you have already launched 2,4,6,8 bay NAS, in my opinion you perfectly know what market segmentation you want to go, and because there are another big NAS players in this field I completely agree with your statement about these two things : take security and reliability seriously.

I would like to know why there are no options like BITMAP and RAID recovery feature on ASUSTOR RAID volume management, I think it`s very important feature that your R & D must consider adding in the next firmware release.

Please provide more material and best practice in your ASUSTOR college, it`s very useful and it prevents us from improperly configuration.

Best Regards
Astro

[James.W@AST]

Hi Astro,

Thanks for the suggestions. Well I guess we should do some brief explanations here so we can understand what exactly Bitmap and RAID recovery can do.

Bitmap: It can provide fast re-synchronization if one of the hard drives has been plugged out from the RAID volume, and plugged in again. However, the drive must be the original one (contains the original data), otherwise Bitmap will be just useless. Besides, it seems Bitmap only works on EXT2 and EXT3, so I wonder if this still works on EXT4 for the other NAS brands.

RAID Recovery: Basically this feature is only useful if you like to torture your NAS and disks (remove multiple disks on your NAS at the same time while it's still on), and I personally don't think it's a normal behavior...needless to say it has several limitations, such as it only works for some specific RAID types. Besides, as far as I know, RAID recovery is patented, so we may not consider to support this.

And thank you so much for supporting ASUSTOR College, we will keep working on providing more useful materials.

Cheers,

BL

[James.W@AST]

Hi Kurt,

We will definitely consider upgrading AFP to v3. However, since V3 is a major update so I think we should spend more time on testing its reliability (perhaps 3.1 will be available very soon, who knows ). But still, thanks a lot for your reminder,

Cheers,

BL

Thank you Wall-E.

Has Asustor already considered heading to AFP v3 ot get rid of the nasty Apple.double resource files for example?

Regards,
-Kurt.

[txdot]

Is a particular Linux distro used or does ASUSTOR put together its own distro? I recently purchased a Synology DS1512+ but it turns out that they use Tiny Core Linux (I think that's correct) which doesn't include a number of things I'm used to.

[Steve@AST]

Hi txdot,

Our system base on Linux kernel 3.1.2 and added the open source packages (such as BusyBox) that we need.
therefore, something you used to may be not included in our system.

cheers,

Wall-E