Random Tips: Synology, Bonjour Oddities, WordPress Fields and High Sierra

Well, now that we have Hyperbackup working again, it’s time to make some fixes to the Synology volumes. In many ways, Synology is not super obvious how to work because they have their Control Panel and their applications and they spray various settings all over the place.

Synology Working with the interface: Maximize windows

The first confusing thing is they use a multiple window interface inside the browser which works pretty well, but it doesn’t do a good job if the window is smaller than the size of the virtual desktop. So lots of time you can’t see things.

The solution is to always click on the “Expand to fill window” button at the upper right of each window, then it works like a single pane application.

You can still see everything by looking at the taskbar on top, the upper left icon gives you all the running applications.

The most important of these is the control panel, this has lots of settings and you click on it. The other applications have configurations as well, so they (like iOS) pretty much spray things everywhere.

Renaming shares in Synology control panel not File Station

The confusing thing here is that you use the File Station application to create shares, but to change their name, you have to go to Control Panel > File Service and you can edit them there.

Bonjour delay and naming issues

OK, the second issue is that they do support Bonjour, so you can get not have to type the IP address, but depending on the name of your Synology box which you set in Task Bar > Main Menu > Control Panel > Network > General > Server Name so for instance if you name it Synology, then https://synology.local should get you there.

The main issue is that because Bonjour is peer to peer, you can have name collisions with yourself, so on my network, I’ve had this problem and now the name is https://synology-5.local which is pretty frustrating.

I don’t see an easy way to fix this and the names seem to move around, so sometimes it is Synology-2.local so there are times when there are naming conflicts

Homebridge Bonjour does not work

I’ve tried both Chao and Bonjour HAP which is older and neither seem to get me to homebridge.local working, although if you have Unifi the DHCP Hostname does go to the DNS Forwarder so you can access it as home bridge.localdomain. But, then you do have to wait a bit for all this to happen

WordPress and the annoying Custom Fields in the editor

OK, when you have enough plug-ins loaded, you get a sea of metaboxes at the bottom of the edit screen with no obvious way to remove it. Turns out if you hit the “down arrow” that’s in the middle enough, then they will all just disappear. So annoying! For instance, Yoast SEO, Bluberry Powerpress and generic Custom Fields are all in the WordPress edit window, and that works terribly for small edit screens.

There must be a way to permanently get rid of these. I tried Adminimize, but this doesn’t seem to have an easy understand way to remove fields. So, it’s a pain, but three clicks, and I get rid of these buttons until I can figure out where in the Plugins you can disable this stuff.

Using High Sierra as of August 2021 Homebrew problems

Well, the big issue here is that with our venerable Mac mini 2014, it can only run High Sierra, so many tools are breaking down for these old versions. For example, with Homebrew, these things do not work mainly because OpenSSL does not install, and even if you try to install OpenSSL with Macports it doesn’t work