Be aware if you are using Docker on Synology

Hi,

I just saw the Home Lab Show Ep. 2 on TLS Chanel where you mentioned running docker on Synology NAS.
That actually was my starting point into the docker world, and as you say it is very easy to start with and if you got a Synology NAS at home, it is a great way for stating out.
The problem with these NAS or better call it a flaw, is the old kernel version used by Synology on their DSM. My DS2415+ is on the newest version DSM 6.2.3-25426 U3 (2020-12-16) for this model, but it is still based on Linux Kernel 3.10.105.
It happened to me that a container I was running needed to be updated for functionality reason, but the updated application was depending on a newer kernel and that forced me to dive further into docker development and deployment.
For me it kind of was good thing, because I love to learn and suddenly had whole lot of ideas juggling around, but if this would happen to someone using docker on Synology in production, you certainly going to have a bad day.
According to a reddit post Synology’s of 2018 - 2019 or newer with DSM 6.2.2-24922 U3 have been recently updated to Linux kernel 4.4.59 which is better, but still was released 4 years ago.

Thank you for all your great tutorials, that more than once save my day :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I really appreciate it. I’ll keep this in mind if I do more content on Synology and containers.

It’s kind of weird, and not very good news, if Synology isn’t doing kernel updates on older NAS units. Our DS1618+ all have the newer kernel so we have no issues with Docker or VMs, but now it kinda feels like there’s a clock ticking… :hourglass: :thinking: