My upgrade of Synology DSM to 7.0 could hardly be simpler

My Synology NAS (DS-1520+) has been running DSM 6, which is showing its age. I starting building this in 2018 and recently migrated to this new hardware. The server has been built from scratch with this one major release of the operating system. A few months ago DSM 7.0 was released and I’ve both been looking forward to it, and dreading it. You can only go one direction with DSM upgrades – forward. If things quit working then you just have to fix them.

And then after all the worrying and studying release notes etc. the whole upgrade went off with (almost) not a single hiccup! There have been dramatic changes to some of the packages. For example the Photo Station application has now merged with Moments and becomes Synology Photos. I have a lot of different services running including file sharing, Web Station, Synology Drive Server, Hyper Backup, Snapshot Replication, Active Backup for Business, Synology Contacts, Notes, Chat, Photos, Bitwarden, and others!

After the upgrade completed (which took about 1/2 hour) my system restarted and after some checking around it looked like everything was working, with the system pretty busy for a while building new indexes and codecs for movie files etc.

Processing my “vast” media library 🙂

But then I was disappointed to find that each of my wordpress web sites had quit working (including this one) and just show a big error message about how the site can’t connect to the database. Uh oh…then a check at the Package Center showed me that several packages had failed to update during the upgrade.

The upgrade did not complete on all the packages automatically

Fixing my wordpress sites was as simple as pressing the repair button on the MariaDB and phpMyAdmin packages. In the case of topng, that’s a third party package and I at least temporarily deleted it – not critical (I’ll check for a update later).

Now I at least think everything I do with the server is working well. What a relief! That could have really messed me up for hours or longer, but Synology did a great job with their beta program last year and I’m glad to join the ranks of their happy customers 🙂

Leave a Comment