I’ve just upgraded the NAS operating system from DSM4.3 to DSM5.0
There are a number of changes, but the biggest obvious one is the UI, which now looks like this:
Jazzed up, huh?
When you crack open the bonnet and look inside, you notice that the changes go beyond the visual.
The new operating system drops MySQL out of the picture, and switches to MariaDB.
Why?
Since MySQL got bought up by Oracle, a growing number of people have become concerned that the brilliant free database that drives so many internet functions might stop being free (or might get taken off the market altogether by Oracle, and replaced with a paid-for product).
These people (the concerned ones) took foundation components from the MySQL product, added some updated thinking, and produced MariaDB.
I was understandably nervous about accepting the DSM upgrade. I use MySQL to run database functions, and use it to interface with .php front-ends. I also use MySQL to run security functions on the NAS, and content indexing features.
So this evening I backed everything up, took a deep breath and hit the upgrade button.
The NAS did its upgrade thing, rebooted itself and popped back up.
The WordPress intranet site (yeah, pretty geeky, huh?) popped straight back up and the first thing I noticed was how fast it was.
I poked around in the phpMyAdmin control panel to make sure that everything was still there, and doing what it should be.
All of the MySQL databases (I’m currently running five) had been converted to MariaDB.
I could access the databases through the GUI and could execute SELECT and UPDATE and DELETE statements in the SQL panel.
I could also import and export databases, and build new tables and drop tables at will.
And yes, it all seemed to be much quicker than it had been, when the back-end environment was MySQL.
In fact it looked so quick that I have opened port 80 on my router again, and brought this blog back from Arizona, and am currently hosting it on my NAS (not on HP Server A or HP Server B).
Just, you know, for a laugh.
