Author: Adam Fowler

Synology Diskstation Overview

Posted on by Adam Fowler

After getting an old Synology Diskstation DS1813+ and setting it up, I had Synology reach out to me asking if I’d like to test one of their newer devices and check out it’s Office 365 backup capabilities. I’ll do a separate writeup of how that works, but figured I should start with more of an overview of the Synology Diskstations.

A Synology Diskstation is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device which depending on the model, takes up to a certain amount of drives in it which are hot swappable, and no tools necessary to add or remove a drive. They’re quite an elegant solution to having a bunch of disks around. Beyond holding disks (hard drive or solid state) it’s also a server (at least the models I’ve been playing with – some of the smaller end devices might not do this).

What might you need a NAS for? Virtual machines, backups, multimedia content, CCTV recordings – the same reason you’d have any storage really, but your requirements going beyond a single disk for size, performance or redundancy purposes.

One of the big selling points of having a Synology Diskstation for me is a special RAID option called Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR). This allows you to have disks of different sizes in your RAID, and still be able to add more disks in the future. Instead of striping the entire disk’s contents across other disks, it breaks it into smaller chunks reducing or eliminating wasted empty space that adding a bigger disk in a standard RAID type would do. Read the link above for a much better explanation than I could give.

The older 8 bay DS1813+ was rather easy to set up; the video at the top of this post walks you through how to do it. The actual interface to perform the setup after the initial configuration is web based, and feels and drives like a mini OS. You have things like control panel, an app store (called the package center) and even docker to run a bunch of third party solutions in containers.

You get great visibility on what the device is doing via the Resource Monitor app:

I’d been slowly migrating data off of two HP Gen8 Microservers that had a bunch of files scattered across several different disks. I’d started with two disks (a 10TB and 6TB) in the DS1813+ in SHR, copied data across, and gradually moved more and more disks in until I had 7 across. I would have had more, but I hit two slight roadblocks: You can’t add a smaller disk than the first smallest disk’s size in a SHR setup (which was 6TB, and I was trying to add a 4TB). I had two of those, but then it turned out one was failing S.M.A.R.T. checks anyway, which I ended up destroying.

Here’s where I’m up to now – adding a 12TB disk in from slot 8 to the current 30TB capacity storage pool (set up as a single volume), which will bump it up to 40TB usable.

Anyway, that was all up and running great. I actually had redundancy, and I didn’t have to commit to a particular disk size. Something I’d never had before at home because I was too tight to build my own box, buy a bunch of disks to see myself OK for the next few years, and find the time to build it all up. The Diskstation despite being given to me secondhand ticked all those boxes, and honestly I was about to buy one with my own money anyway.

Once this was all set up, the new unit from Synology arrived. I set this one up next to the old one for some comparisons – the DS1618+ has more RAM, faster CPU, a USB3 port on the front, an expansion slot for 2x SSDs or 10GB NIC, and 6 disk slots rather than 8, but overall it was pretty similar.

Synology NAS: On the left: Diskstation DS1813+. On the right: Diskstation 1618+

These devices run fairly quiet – they’re about 60cm from my head right now and there’s just the slight hum of the fans.

You might be wondering about the naming convention on what a DS1813+ is compared to a DS1618+ – and I am too, but the DS1813+ is an 8 bay made in 2013, and a DS1618+ is a 6 bay made in 2018. You’ve also got other models like a DS918+ which is actually a 4 bay, but expandable up to 9 with a second unit, also made in 2018. The first 1 or 2 digits is normally what it can scale up to, rather than how many bays are in the model. A full list of models are on Synology’s website.

I thought I’d try something a bit weird on the DS1618+ to start mucking around with – I put two much smaller 320GB HDDs in it, then added a third 4TB drive to the SHR setup. Despite the older, smaller drives being a lot noisier, it worked. I’ve still only got 586GB capacity, but it shows you can start small and work your way up.

Synology have a great website for showing how much space you will get for whatever disk combination you throw at it which is worth playing around with.

I also added a SSD Cache to this setup – the advisor will look at what you have and give a recommended SSD size, but you can use whatever you want. I had a single 60GB SSD spare, so put that in to slot 6.

It worth noting that if you want a read/write SSD Cache setup, you need two SSDs installed. For read only, just 1 is fine. Although I put this SSD into one of the bays, I could have also bought an expansion card and added two M.2 SSDs to not use up any of the bays. Again, Synology have a lot more details on their website.

I’m really happy with my setup now, and I won’t have data loss like I had before without any disk redundancy. It’s worth noting that a very large disk can take a few days to add in, and during that time you’d have no redundancy – but you can have a hot spare option or SHR-2 that has two disks for redundancy rather than 1. For that setup you need at least 4 disks, and you can convert a SHR-1 to a SHR-2.

Next time, I’ll go through the Office 365 Backup features of the Diskstation device (which is free to use!).

Update 3rd August 2020

Lars Klint has a video on setting up his DiskStation 920+ which is incredibly similar to the 1618+ setup, so have a watch at a self proclaimed ‘NAS noob’ going through the initial config:

Residential Gigabit Internet in Australia on NBN

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Back in December 2015, I was connected to the National Broadband Network (NBN) via Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and wrote about it. It’s taken 5 years for a faster speed to be available to consumers at a reasonable price.

(This is my personal experience in changing over to Gigabit internet, and is not sponsored or influenced by anyone in any way.)

Yes – it’s now possible to get reasonably priced, consumer gigabit internet in Australia. That is, if you’re lucky enough to have NBN FTTP or really lucky and in the 7% of the NBN Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) households.

You could get faster than 100mbit before this, but only through a few ISPs with 250mbit down but 250/100Mbps was at $250AU per month, and 250/25Mbps at $169AU.

I’m in that first group, sweet sweet fibre running straight into my premises (or premise?). I was already on 100 megabits per second down, 40 megabits per second up with Internode unlimited for $99AU per month, but Aussie Broadband’s new offering of 1000/50Mbps for $149AU was too good to not try. At worst, I could just go back to Aussie Broadband’s plan identical to Internode’s.

Changing over to Aussie was the quickest ISP change I’ve ever done. After submitting an online form and providing credit card details, I’d had an alert half an hour later that the service was now active on port UNI-D 1 on my network termination device. I changed the network cable over from one port to the other, checked the settings on my Unifi Dream Machine (UDM) and changed the WAN connection type from PPPoE to DHCP and I was on.

At the time of signing up, it was still a day away or so from the gigabit plan being released, but speedtest showed I was getting the same as before on a 100/40Mbit plan.

The next day (May 29th 2020) when the ‘Home Ultrafast’ plan came out, I immediately switched over. Except, my speeds didn’t change. Thankfully, @dawnstarau saved me a lot of time and said to check my UDM settings and look at the Smart Queues up and down rates. After fixing those, I was in the fast lane.

Unifi Dream Machine Smart Queues settings (correct for 1000/50Mbps)
First speed test after!

741Mbps down and 47Mbps up! However, that’s only ~3/4 of a gigabit connection! After a day or so things seemed to speed up a bit more and this is the numbers I’ll normally see:

877Mbps down. It’s close enough to gigabit on a service that doesn’t guarantee gigabit, and gigabit is the speed that all my wired ethernet devices talk to each other at. For wireless, you’ll need an access point and device on 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) to have a chance at gigabit or faster for your devices to talk to each other fast enough – but, my Google Pixel 4 XL that has 802.11ac shows top speeds at around 230Mbps when I’m about 1 1/2 metres away from an access point, way under what my wired devices see.

How is life on gigabit? Web pages actually do load faster. They weren’t slow in the first place, but things like adverts are noticeably ‘instant’ and an entire page will flash up fully populated, rather than the experience of having a lot of the page load then ads load half a second later.

Steam downloads a lot faster too, games will peak download around 90Mbps with often around the 50-60Mbps mark. Getting something several times faster makes a big difference when it takes 8 minutes to fully download a large game rather than 45 minutes; it means I’ll happily uninstall a game and get it later if needed, rather than hoarding a giant game ‘just in case’.

Youtube seems better at quickly detecting HD – even on 100mbit, it would often start at 480p and then work it’s way up to higher resolutions, but now it’s at least 720p.

Gaming isn’t much different, apart from giant Call of Duty patches which see similar speeds to Steam.

I don’t mind if two different TVs are streaming YouTube, another’s watching Netflix at 4K and someone wants to online game – the pipe is now big enough that nobody should lessen the experience of anyone else ever. Not that it was really a problem before, but as my kids get older they’ll be doing more and more things online.

If time is money, then for an extra $50 a month, I think it’s worth it to wait up to 10x less to download something. It’s even better having the flexibility to jump around as there’s no contract, so if I’m having a quiet month I could always just change plans.

Gigabit is what the NBN’s future promise was at the start until politics got in the way, and it’s really disappointing this option isn’t there for all Australians. Imagine if we did the entire rollout on Fibre and Covid-19 hit. We’d have everyone able to work at home on solid connections, instead of the hybrid mess we have now.

Also, if you sign up for Aussie Broadband make sure you use a friend code. Both sides get $50 credit – either use my code 3661840 , or even better if you have a friend already on Aussie Broadband, ask them to go to https://my.aussiebroadband.com.au/#/profile/ and tell you their Refer-A-Friend Code.

Anything you’d like to know or want me to test? Let me know in the comments.

What to Look for in an Online Gaming Site

Posted on by Adam Fowler
Credit Unsplash


During these ‘not normal’ times, a lot of people are finding comfort in playing games that will give them a sense of control and normalcy, connect them with their friends and other players, help them escape from the pressures of the world, and in some cases, help them win prizes. For instance, Crane Master or Claw Machine Master, which I talked about in one of my previous posts, offers a bunch of different games that come with a multitude of prizes, including toys, food and gadgets. There are tons of games out there, and while finding the right game for you can be quite a daunting task sometimes, figuring out which site to play on can be even more challenging. To help you look for one, here are some of the things you should look for when it comes to choosing an online gaming site:

Availability in your country

For games that are unique to certain countries such as claw machines, the first thing you have to consider is its availability in your country. For instance, although the computer and mobile versions of the claw machine game Sega Catcher Online were already widely available in big markets such as the US, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will also be available in other equally competitive markets such as Australia. If you have a specific game in mind, it would be a good idea to first check if it is available in your country.

Reputation and customer service availability

More often than not, you will be playing with real money when dealing with online gaming sites. That’s why it would be in your best interest to go for well-established sites that have a proven track record for providing quality customer service and are known for being secure. Before signing up to any site, make it a habit to search the internet for any negative reports or reviews. However make sure that the review site is verified as there are lots of sites that have been manipulated. Yellow Pages and Yelp are considered two of best website or business review sites in Australia, so you might want to check them out first before picking out an online gaming site.

Selection of games

The most important part of choosing an online gaming site is finding one that has content that you will enjoy. In most cases, gaming sites partner up with game developers in order to create platforms that provide a wide array of titles, and many of the biggest gaming companies have worked together to provide new versions of classic games. Case in point, Foxy Games partnered with slot developer Megaways to bring dozens of different themed titles to their players, all available on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. The games are varied and based around different interests whether that be pop culture, travel or history. When choosing an online gaming site look for ones that have both a wide selection and can be played on multiple devices.

Promotions, welcome bonuses and perks

To rise above the competition and encourage more players to sign up, online gaming sites usually offer promotions and welcome bonuses. To take full advantage of such offers, you have to put in some work and dedicate some time to finding the right site that will give you the best deal for how often you think you will be playing. For instance, if you will be playing games often, it would be ideal to sign up on gaming sites that offer exclusive access to special themes, icons, ad-free gaming, private chat rooms and beta releases to its premium members.

Choosing the right online gaming site is like anything else, you need to undertake a little research and look for the best deals. I hope my article has helped in this regard and you will find new online platforms to use.

Default Cloud Voicemail Language

Posted on by Adam Fowler

When Cloud Voicemail a.k.a. Azure Voicemail (which replaced Unified Messaging) is activated for a mailbox, a default language is set. This value is known as the ‘promptlanguage’ and according to Microsoft Documentation will be set based on the default language for your organisation in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

The problem is, that value is ‘English’ and doesn’t define which regional set of English you want – en-US, en-UK, en-AU etc. The full list of language codes is available here.

With Engish set as the preferred language, Azure Voicemail decides that you must be wanting en-US as your promptlanguage – which you may not actually want. The default voicemail greeting is rather different when set to en-US vs en-UK vs en-AU.

If you’d like to see what a user has, use the PowerShell command:

Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings -identity [email protected]

and check the value ‘PromptLanguage’.

On a per user basis, this value can be changed either by the user themselves at https://mysettings.lync.com/voicemail or by an admin with the PowerShell command:

Set-CsOnlineVoicemailUserSettings -identity [email protected] -PromptLanguage en-AU

This still doesn’t solve the tenant wide problem, or set a default.

For existing users, we just need to get a list of users and change the promptlanguage setting, which can be done with this set of PowerShell commands (includes connecting to SfBO which can be used for the above command also):

$sfbsession = new-csonlinesession -username [email protected] -OverrideAdminDomain contoso.onmicrosoft.com


Import-PSSession $sfbsession


$users = Get-CsOnlineuser


foreach ($user in $users) {set-csonlinevoicemailusersettings -identity $user.userprincipalname -promptlanguage en-AU}

Note the use of the -OverrideAdminDomain switch, which I learnt from this blog post in case you are having issues connecting to Skype for Business Online.

This process also may take a long time depending how many users you have, as very roughly it takes about a second per user to change the value.

This will fix your existing users, but what about new ones? You could have the setting modified set as part of the user creation process, but that’s an extra step and you’d need to wait for Azure Voicemail to be ready – in my experience it’s not a service that’ll be available quickly after enabling. At this stage I haven’t found a way to do it though, so you’ll need to consider adding this configuration as part of user setup.

If you haven’t even thought about what language you’re using – have a look and try each one, as you might find one that you’re happier with than the US.

Microsoft Teams Dial In Number Licensing – Conference Bridging

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Teams does a bunch of different things. One of those things, is meetings. It does it quite well too, and many more people have started using Microsoft Teams this year. There’s a few different types of meetings (including Live Events) and a huge amount of content available (video) on advice on how to run one.

However, if you’re not using Microsoft Teams as a full phone system, then meetings are restricted to software based only – you need to use the Microsoft Teams client via browser or full install (on desktop or mobile) to join; there’s no dial in number.

It is possible to buy licenses to give users the ability to create a meeting that also has dial-in support (called Conference Bridging), as long as you are a Volume or Licensing customer. If you meet the pre-requisites, then this just needs an Audio Conferencing license of some sort, with the standard license being per user (like most other licenses) and several dollars a month. In Australia at the time of writing, a license costs RRP $5.50AU if you already have an E1 or E3 license.

For companies that have a central set of staff creating meetings on behalf of the company, then buying a small amount of licenses just for those users can be a good way of getting the dial in option to add value and give a rather cheap way of providing a full audio and video conferencing solution.

A much less common option method of providing a dial in number for Microsoft Teams meetings is using Audio Conferencing pay-per-minute. The way this works is by loading up credits into
Communications Credits , applying the free license to whomever you like, and anyone using a dial-in number starts using those credits. The rates vary wildly based on many scenarios, so you’ll need to check them out for yourself – from less than 10 cents AU upward.

Quick run through of what to set up – read it all before doing any of it!


Communications Credits
Microsoft’s doco explains how to do this rather clearly:

In the Microsoft 365 admin center > Billing > Purchase Services > Add Ons you can select Communication Credits to add the credits, and you can add credit manually at any time. You can also enable the Auto-recharge option, which will allow automatic account refills when the balance falls below the threshold that you set.

I couldn’t see that Add Ons category, so searched for “Communication Credits’ under the Purchase Services area, had no results but then saw a link to check the Add-ons category’. On that list I could then see Communication Credits to add. For me in Australia, the minimum was $20.

The auto recharge option can only be triggered when the amount goes below $50 as a minimum (smallest number the field would accept), but I could recharge for another $20, so that’s a fairly small commitment if you expect minimal usage. I set this when I had $20 in, and it did a double recharge to get over the $50 mark instantly.

Audio Conferencing pay-per-minute

You can only get this if you’re a Volume and Licensing customer of Microsoft.

This was the tricky one to find out, but easy once you know what to ask for. You’ll need to ask your license reseller/LAR for:

AudioConfPayPerMin ShrdSvr ALNG SubsVL MVL PerUsr , SKU: HUR-00002

It’s a $0 license, and you may need to say how many licenses (they’re free so go high).

Once they order it, the licenses should turn up like any other under an enterprise agreement, called “Microsoft 365 Audio Conferencing Pay-Per-Minute”.

Applying the license

You can’t just apply the Communications Credits license to a user, as it’ll tell you they need to have an Audio Conferencing plan. You can do both at the same time manually, as long as the user has a Skype for Business Online or Microsoft Teams license.

If you want to use Azure AD and assign a license to a group you’ll need to tick all three licenses; Communications Credits, Audio Conferencing pay-per-minute, and Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business. It doesn’t matter if members of the group already get part of the license from another group membership, it requires all three to be applied.

Microsoft Teams Configuration

There’s not much to do here, you might already be configured and ready to go – but you can check your Conference Bridging settings in the Teams admin center and make sure you’re happy with the default number and options.

You’re done! It can take a little while for the dial in number to show in the Teams signature when creating a meeting via Outlook – maybe a few hours from my experience.

You can check the status of your credits in the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Billing > Your Products > Communications Credits (it’ll have the Skype for Business logo).

Hopefully this helps people that have Teams, but aren’t ready to go to it for a full voice solution yet, while allowing others to dial into meetings (very handy when someone doesn’t have a good internet connection).

Note: You can see how your credits are being used here:

  1. Sign in to Office 365, navigate to the “Teams admin portal”, then “Legacy Portal” on the left menu.
  2. Navigate to “Reports” on the left menu, then the “PSTN minute pools” tab.