bobpeers -> blog

As much as I love Synology products one glaring omission has been the lack of Linux support to set up the Disk Station. Bearing in mind that the products themselves run Linux it seems very strange that you have to use a Mac or Windows PC to get them up and running.

Reading this announcement I’m pleased to see that they have a beta release that now supports Linux. Well it actually states that it supports Ubuntu but I really hope they work on releasing packages for other distributions or at least the source so we can compile it for ourselves.

In the worst case I can still install it using Ubuntu in a virtual machine, still miles better than having to have Windows around just for this.

I decided to give GPA a try just to see how easy it is to encrypt files on Linux. The program installed no problem using yum.

# yum install gpa

Upon starting I created a key (when the warning says this takes a while it’s no lie, it took about 5 minutes on my computer but I’ve since read that it’s a good idea to press some keys and move the mouse to generate random data faster) and then encrypted a test file, no problem there.

Next I tried to decrypt the same file but I just got a warning saying ‘Wrong Passphrase’, I understand the warning but the problem is that I never get prompted to enter the passphrase! Looks like I’ll have to learn the command line instead.

It’s also a shame that encryption is not better integrated into the file manager. In Windows it’s certainly very easy to encrypt files from Windows Explorer, even through the context menu, I’d really like to see the same in Gnome.