Configuring Synology NAS for my home network

After having plugged my DS215j into my home network some fine tuning had to be done. This following list is my personal protocol in case I have to do this once again - perhaps it is be helpful for other Synology users as well.

1. DSM 5.2 more or less forces the user to put multimedia files into auto-generated folders (video/photo/music). However on my clients I prefer one share "multimedia" over mapping three network drives. I solved this by setting up a shared folder "multimedia" containing 3 symbolic links video, photo and music that point to the corresponding auto-generated folders (here is how to create permanent symbolic links on the Synology - note that you have to have some knowledge how vi works)

2. User accounts for my wife, the children and me are to be set up. Note that interaction between Synology and Windows / Mac without a directory server works best if credentials are kept synchronous both on clients and the NAS.

3. The three folders mentioned above had to be given appropriate permissions: read-write for admin group and my own user, my wife and the children are only allowed to read ;-)

4. On each of the clients, I mapped 2 network drives: the multimedia share and a personal home.

5. Configured standby behavior of the HDDs:

6. Set up Cloud Station for my working directories both on Synology and my clients. I tried out cloud sync with dropbox but moved away from that again because of privacy concerns ;-) and the fact that this is interfering with the standby times of the HDDs.

7. Configuration of automatic shutdown at night:

8. Due to security reasons I changed SSH to use a different port than default port 22.

9. I assigned the machine a static IP in my router configuration.

10. Because I want to have a public accessible node server I configured DDNS (at first I tried to do this within my router, but changes of the public IP were not notified the the DDNS provider):

11. To start the node server on automatically I added "node [path to js starting http server]" to rc.local

12. Port forwarding configured in router:

12. Note that Synology's multimedia apps Audio, Video and PhotoStation are only necessary when you want to access your multimedia through the browser - which is not the case for me, so I did not activate them.