In Lightroom 5, whenever you create a new catalogue and subsequently try to import photos using the Add Folder option, the file browser dialog by default is supposed to open to the folder the new catalogue was created in. However, you might experience a possible annoyance where Lightroom keeps opening a particular folder regardless of how many times and where you create new catalogues in.

To fix this, open up the Lightroom 5 Preferences.agprefs file which can usually be found in the  C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences folder (sorry, I don’t know what the Mac equivalent is!) and delete the line that starts with

AgDialogs_currentDirectory

Note: the value in this line should match the folder that Lightroom always browses wrongly to by default.

So, for days I had been struggling with this very peculiar problem. On my PC, I had installed a Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter which came with 802.3ad dynamic link aggregation (i.e. LACP) support but for some reason or another, I could only successfully enable static link aggregation with my Netgear GS110TP switch. FWIW, I had absolutely no issues setting up LACP with my Synology 1813+ NAS.

After lots of trial and error, the culprit turned out to be the Symantec Endpoint Protection software running on my PC. I had this module called Network Threat Protection running and it must have been filtering the necessary network control messages required to establish an LACP link with my switch.

After I disabled Network Threat Protection, setting up LACP worked as a charm. In addition, it also had the side-effect of tremendously improving my PC-to-NAS copy speeds! See previous post on this topic.

So having recently set up my Synology 1813+ NAS with link aggregation to a Netgear GS110TP switch with 9KB jumbo frames enabled, I was getting excruciatingly slow upload speeds from my PC to a file share on the NAS. To be precise, I was only getting upload speeds between 35 – 45 MB/s, quite unacceptable given my hardware and network configuration.

After many days of troubleshooting, I was able to nail down the culprit to these two programs:

• Directory Opus 10.5.4.0 (5080) – Note: this is an Explorer replacement
• Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.4013.4013 – Note: the specific offending module is called “Network Threat Protection”

Tuning Step 1

Note: for this step, I disabled Symantec Endpoint Protection.

First, I tuned Directory Opus by adjusting the copy_buffer_size setting under Miscellaneous -> Advanced. The default value is 6KB which was way too small. By gradually increasing this value, you can see in the graph below that my throughput increased as well, until hitting a maximum and gradually tapering off. The optimal setting for me turned out to be 512KB, which practically doubled my PC-to-NAS speed.

Tuning Step 2

Next up, was to disable the Symantec Endpoint Protection’s Network Thread Protection (SEPNTP) module. I was never able to fully narrow down the setting in this module that caused my transfer speeds to drop, but what I did notice was that with this feature turned on, transfer speeds could fluctuate between anything from 20-40% slower. There was no pattern at all. For e.g. after implementing Step 1 above, with SEPNTP enabled, my PC-to-NAS copy speeds could sometimes drop to as low as 50-70+ MB/s.

I think this is too big a penalty to pay so promptly disabled SEPNTP and downloaded ZoneAlarm Basic for my software firewall needs.

So now that I have 2 NAS devices running (at least till I can sell off the old one!), I thought it would be good to capture some notes on the software differences between the two. These are really just personal observations and is not meant to be an exhaustive list (although I will continue to add-on where possible). FWIW, I have a QNAP TS-459 Pro and a Synology 1813+.

QNAP Firmware version: QTS 3.8.3 Build 20130426 (I know QTS 4 has been out for some time but I just didn’t want to risk doing an upgrade at this point)
Synology Firmware version: DSM 4.3-3810 (at the time of writing, DSM 5 is still in public beta)

• Security
  • IP Blocking
    • Both QTP and DSM allow you to deny access (blacklist) or allow access (whitelist) to specified IP addresses.
    • (+) QTP allows IP addresses to be specified either individually, by subnet or as a range.
    • (-) DSM only allows you to do it individually or by subnet in the Firewall and QoS section, i.e. there is no way to specify a range of IP addresses.
    • (+) However, in DSM, you can upload a list of IP addresses to block or allow via the Auto Block section. In theory, I think this would allow me to use public IP block lists, more research required here.
• Reports
  • (+) QTP: In the Disk Usage tab under Resource Monitor, there is a pie chart that shows a % breakdown of space utilization by network shares.
  • (-) DSM: In the Volume tab under Resource Monitor, the pie chart only shows a % breakdown between used and free space.
  • Despite QTP being better here, this is an area where I think both really require serious improvements, e.g. why not provide a report that allows admins to drill down into exact utilization by share, by folder, etc. Or a report of the Top N largest files.
• Time Synchronization
  • (+) QTP: The NTP server and interval can be specified.
  • (-) DSM: Only the NTP server can be specified. To change the interval settings, you have to SSH in and edit the /etc/ntp.conf file.

More comparisons to add on the RAID modes supported, but in short, Synology’s SHR > Raid-5 based on available space provisioned when the array contains larger disks than the base HDD size.

I recently upgraded/migrated from a 4-bay QNAP TS-459 Pro to an 8-bay Synology 1813+. As a photographer, you won’t believe how much space digital files can consume (a typical photoshoot can easily take up between 5-10GB of storage).

However, one very strange thing that I immediately noticed a day after migrating my images (RAW, PSD, JPG) was that almost 100GB on space on the 1813+ was being used just for thumbnail files. I know this because I regularly sync my images folder with my main PC and my sync software (SyncBackSE) lets me know the total size of files that needs to be copied across from the PC-to-NAS/NAS-to-PC. There were folders called “.@__thumb” everywhere, in my root folder, image negatives and exported subfolders, everywhere!

Try doing a Google and most content that comes back is around disabling Video Station, etc. However, the real cause of the thumbnail generation is not from this package, from from a daemon (i.e. that’s a Service for the Windows folks) called S77synomkthumbd.sh that needs to be stopped and prevented from running in the future. Here are the steps to get that done:

1. SSH into the NAS. Make this option is enabled in DSM via [Control Panel] -> [Terminal]. I use a neat little program called PuTTY.
2. When prompted to login, use root and not admin. The passwords should be identical.
3. Once in, browse to /usr/syno/etc/rc.d and edit the file called S77synomkthumbd.sh. I’m currently using DSM 4.3 so the only text editor available is vi.
4. Again, this could be DSM 4.3 specific. In the editor, comment out the line (i.e. add a “#” symbol at the start of the line) that says $SYNOMKTHUMBD.
5. Save the file, i.e. type “:w” followed by “:q”.
6. Next, stop the service by typing:
   /usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S77synomkthumbd.sh stop.
7. This step is optional, do only if the “.@__thumb” directories have already been created – remove them by typing the following command: find /volume1 -name '.@__thumb' -type d -exec rm -rf "{}" \;
8. Sit back and relax, it might take a very long time!

Credit to the following articles here and here that helped me come to this obscure issue:

• Disable the ‘stupid’ thumbnails generation on Synology NAS
• Stop thumbnail daemon from adding @eadir to all folders
• Controlling thumbnail generation on a Synology NAS

30 Nov 2013 – Bought a Corsair H80i liquid cooler kit for my new Haswell CPU and did an upgrade to Windows 8.1 in the process only to find out that Windows could not detect the cooler at all no matter which USB port (both internal and external) I plugged it into. Though the cooler still worked (i.e. fans were spinning and liquid was being cycled), the problem was that the fans were always spinning very high even at low CPU load causing an unbearable sustained hum.

After much Googling and hundreds of dead-ends, I managed to find a solution (source) that worked that involves modifying the registry:

“Go into the registry and look for HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\VID_1B1C&PID_0C04. For each port/path string you see under this (numbers and ampersands smushed together), open the “Device Parameters” and change the FOUR DWORD settings to 0 (AllowIdleIrpInD3, DeviceSelectiveSuspended, EnhancedPowerManagementEnabled, SelectiveSuspendEnabled). Reboot.”

After making the changes, I rebooted, launched the Corsair Link 2 software and could now see the H80i. Consequently, I was able to change the fan speeds from “Fixed RPM” to “Balanced” which helped bring down the noise a little.

Hope this post manages to help someone and credit to the person who posted the original fix. And FWIW, I’m using an Asus Sabertooth Z87 motherboard.