What is DDSM in Synology and How to Install it?

what-is-ddsm-in-synology-and-how-to-install-it

In our previous post we explained about Synology’s RAID Calculator. Now we’re going to explain how to install and use DDSM.

What is DDSM?

DDSM is a Synology package that allows you to manage the disk space on the Synology server. DDSM is included in DSM 4.3 and above editions and is fully compatible with Synology’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), which allows virtualizing Windows and Linux systems on the same host. We will not describe how to install and configure VMM, please read this article for this information instead: we also tested DDSM with different Linux distributions running as guest OSes within VMM – all worked like a charm including sound support! The only problem was that the integrated WLAN device could not be used for bridging from guests’ os -> LAN network since it always assigned an IP-address from DHCP-Server of the hosting Diskstation.

This article will explain how to install/replace DDSM and how to update DDSM if there is an update available.

How to install DDSM?

1. Connect to your Diskstation via ssh with PuTTY.exe or any other SSH-Client of your choice.

2. Login as root with your admin password (default ‘admin’).

3. Download DDSM from Synology’s website

4. Unpack it and copy it to a directory of your choice on the Diskstation where you want it installed: for example /volume1/@appstore/Docker DSM plugin/Docker DSM Plugin-x86_64-1.181113.img – don’t forget the extra “-” at the end!

5. Reboot your Diskstation.

6. Check if your Diskstation has a green “ACTIVE” in front of it:

7. Now go to the DDSM-Page via ssh and check if its installed correctly: /usr/syno/bin/dockerdmsplugin -v

8. If you see a version number that matches with the release, then you have successfully installed Docker DSM Plugin – success! You can now proceed to configure DDSM as described below.

Make sure you read all comments before executing anything and ask yourself if this might be useful for your use case (e.g. you will need to use your internal IP address instead of the DDNS-URL for Dockerhub).

If you have DSM 6.0…

1. The first step is to go to DSM 6 control panel, then choose “Software” then choose “settings”.

2. The next step is that you need to search for DDSM and click on it. After this you should see something like this:

3. As you can see in the left part of the screen, there are different options for updating your DDSM version (usually every week or so). If there is an update available, click on it and after that chose “download & upgrade now”

4. If you don’t want to update DDSM every day, you can also choose “Manual upgrade” and download the file yourself.

5. After this is done, go back to the software section and choose “Settings”, then click on “General”. After that choose your disk (if you have one) and tick the box to show extended information :

6. We renamed the NAS in DSM 6.1 from Synology_XS_station to DS1517+ and it did not rename itself in all places (disk manager did not recognize it). If you take a look at point no 3 there is also another option: automount. This will mount disks automatically after they are connected. the downside of this option is that you can only add one disk after another and they will be named using the scheme of that machine: xs-….

7. We chose “manual upgrade” and downloaded the file ourselves. Next, we went to the DSM section and chose “Settings”, then click on “General”. After this, we selected our NAS (if you have one) and ticked the box to show extended information. We also changed the name from Synology_XS_station to DS1517+ in here, but it did not rename itself everywhere. If you are taking a look at point number 3 there is yet another option: Automount. This will automatically mount disks when they are connected. The downside of this option is that you can only add one disk after another. You can also choose to boot from them, but this is more for advanced users.

8. Finally, we wanted to give our NAS a static IP address. We simply added the address of 192.168.0.100 and network mask 255.255.255.0 (or /24) and also gave it a unique hostname, like Raspberrypi. Now that we had completed all these steps we went back to the main window and clicked on “Network” at the top left corner, where we managed to mount our disk under NFS (show me how ). And this was it! Our files were now visible through Ubuntu’s file manager as well as through Windows Explorer.

synology-diskstation

Important Information

When you boot your DiskStation with an unsupported filesystem you will be able to proceed with a basic setup. But if you want to use advanced features like a print server, File Station, or Cloud Station then your DiskStation must be formatted with EXT4 as the filesystem.

To change this into an EXT4 filesystem we used a free software called GParted. After creating a bootable GParted-USB stick (details here ) we could format our DiskStation with EXT4 within seconds by going through menu entry Utilities > Format partition… > ext3 > OK. Once the disk formatting was done we had to mount the volume again and copy all existing data from our old NTFS-formatted drive onto our new EXT4-formatted one. This took a few hours but now we had a clean and fresh new EXT4-formatted DiskStation.

Once the copying was done we could create a new EXT4 volume in our DiskStation (using GParted) and then finally mount this new volume to /mnt/volume1. We created another folder here (/mnt/volume1/extend_volume) which we used later on. Now it is time for configuring DDSM on our Synology box.

We recommend using an 8+3 character password with only numbers and capital letters for increased security. This can be changed under Control Panel > User > Edit Password.

The next step is to enable SSH access by going into Control Panel > Terminal & SNMP. Here you should make sure that Enable SSH Service is checked, and also Local Login (under Access Rights) has the following settings: Allow root login: Yes Allow Login: All Users

We can confirm this by ssh-ing into our Synology box from a Linux computer. If you have enabled password authentication in your DiskStation’s Web interface, you should use the same password for logging in to your device through ssh.

We provide managed IT support to SMBs in Melbourne; so you’re in good hands if you run into any issues.

Author:
I am a computer engineer holding a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, complemented by a Master's in Business Administration from University of Strathclyde, Scotland. I currently work as a Senior IT Consultant in Melbourne, Australia. With over 15 years of...