TOS 4.1.27 feedback

Initialization of newly purchased TNAS or re-installation of your TNAS
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iPeriod
Posts: 10
Joined: 19 Jul 2020, 08:56

TOS 4.1.27 feedback

Post by iPeriod »

Hi,
As a first time NAS user I though you may be interested in my experiences with setting up a F4-210 and in particular battling with TOS 4.1.27.

General Comments:
There are a lot of minor issues that could have been picked up early if sufficient time and resources were given to a dedicated test team outside of development.
Because your UI appears to be 'baked in' there is little a technical user can do to fix things or add small enhancements of their own.

Background:
I am accessing the NAS server remotely from Firefox 78.0.2, with security add-on's disabled for the TOS. Some UI elements may vary with different browsers/settings but I'll be commenting on what I see through firefox.

Also why no TNAS client for Linux?

First Login:
I was unable to use my preferred secure email address as my security email destination, so had to use a more public one hosted by one of the big tech companies. Why is this?
Several days later I still haven't received an email from my preferred email address, so I must assume the issue is at your end, possibly communications with the secure email prividers are being restricted.

User Setup:

No real issues, simple but functional UI.

Shared Folder Creation:
Just one issue, the folder name enforces legal character verification, but unfortunately this also applies to the description fields so one cannot use space character when creating a new share.
Workaround is to post edit the folder description after its been created from the main folder menu.

Network Services - Telnet/SSH:

The Telnet setting always reverts to enable after a reboot.

Storage Manager - Volume Creation:
There is a big issue with creating small volumes, you can't !!
There appears to be an arbitary UI enforced minimum size of 100GB. -- Please fix this.

Also its not obvious you can set SSD TRIM, I missed this first time round and only discovered this option for this review.
Please add SSD TRIM status to the main volume's drop down summary.

Region & Language:

Time zone setting is good but NTP server setting is abysmal. You only provide a limited list of mainly .cn based NTP servers.
Users cannot set their own regional, national or even local NTP server. I have advised users to edit the root crontabas a work around.
Please also allow user to set the timing and periodicity of NTP resynchronisations.

Notifications:

I covered this above, certain notification email addresses cannot be used.

Firewall:
The subnet mask has to be of the form 255.255.255.255, please make this requirement obvious in the UI
Cannot set a port or port range.

Restore to Factory Default:
This doesn't work as expected. Only certain settings are cleared.
List of installed apps remains in place, irrespective of them be installed or not.

System Information:

Service status page is really dull, text only and no use of colour. Older version of TOS had a much better status presentation.

Resource Monitor:
This a very crude UI that shows limited information, typically only display metrics from the time the UI is opened.
You should adopt option to displaying historic metrics across different ranges, like the Smoothwall UI

Process UI is basically useless. Ant time one changes a column sort, the setting reverts at the next UI refresh.
You need to fix this and preferably preserve user UI settings.

System Log UI is also basically useless (at least for my needs).
  • the timestamp and IP columns bleeds into the next columns
  • the limited list of log types is abysmal, I doesn't cover all of the system. Again look at Smallwall UI for how to do a better job.
    I want to see at least DHCP server, NTP server, NTP, kernel, proxt, uPNP, and logs from addin apps i.e. clamaV, svn etc.
  • if user column is empty/undefined, this column is dropped from the CVS export and so you get column misalignments in the exported log file - again useless
A bit issue is that the logs are not preserved across NAS reboots, this makes diagnosing various issues almost impossible especially if one loses remote connectivity (as I have) and is forced to power down manually.

Applications Manager:
Installed apps still appear if they have been uninstalled and after a factory reset.

Regards,
iP
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TMSupport
TerraMaster Team
Posts: 2314
Joined: 13 Dec 2019, 15:15

Re: TOS 4.1.27 feedback

Post by TMSupport »

Thank you very much for the detailed report. We will consider it carefully and optimize the TOS.
As for the security email, could you set an example here?
To contact our team, please send email to following addresses, remember to replace (at) with @
Technical team: support(at)terra-master.com (for technical support)
Service team: service(at)terra-master.com (for purchasing, return, replacement, RMA service)
User avatar
iPeriod
Posts: 10
Joined: 19 Jul 2020, 08:56

Re: TOS 4.1.27 feedback

Post by iPeriod »

Hi,
there are a number of security oriented email providers; protonmail.com was the one I used in this instance.
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