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If I already own a synology NAS or buy a cheap second hand one could I use its SN and MAC on my xpenology build to install a legitimately purchased license? Sure, you can, but first read license agrements. IMO, since license is given to a particual hardware, which is identified by pair of serial with mac, by using serial and mac on xpenology and using survillance licence you will violate license agrements. But it is just my opinion and you can ask synology support about that. Let say synology will find a way to identify that you have installed extra license on xpenology, and will revoke all extra licenses with no refund?
What will you do? If I already own a synology NAS or buy a cheap second hand one could I use its SN and MAC on my xpenology build to install a legitimately purchased license? Sure, you can, but first read license agrements. IMO, since license is given to a particual hardware, which is identified by pair of serial with mac, by using serial and mac on xpenology and using survillance licence you will violate license agrements. But it is just my opinion and you can ask synology support about that.
Let say synology will find a way to identify that you have installed extra license on xpenology, and will revoke all extra licenses with no refund? What will you do? You're already violating ToS by using XPEnology, so. Thanks, I was under the impression that xpenology was leveraging open source software (or at least not completely proprietary) and not an infringement of Synology license. Is that not so? That's why I was curious about the surveillance package as it is quite clearly an 'add-on' synology sell and should be compensated for.
Yes, the Xpenology is really only the Linux kernel with some mechanisms in-place to combat the checks done by the Synology OS, extra drivers and it emulates the device that has serial number. But the real problem starts when you download the PAT file and use the proprietary parts of the Synology OS on the box that wasn't licensed for it.
Technically, in some countries its illegal to bypath the mechanisms that prevent you from running on a non-licensed hardware, so the bootloader would also be illegal. Thanks, I was under the impression that xpenology was leveraging open source software (or at least not completely proprietary) and not an infringement of Synology license. Is that not so? That's why I was curious about the surveillance package as it is quite clearly an 'add-on' synology sell and should be compensated for.
Synology's DSM is Linux, with their own proprietary additions (funny thing, they do break GPL with their synobios kernel module!), including the app system, volume system, and the web UI. What we do is take this specifically licensed product (because this together is a product), break that license and ToS, and install it on our hardware. Then we circumvent the protection employed by Synology to make it work (and also we add some extra stuff (kernel drivers for support, mostly). So yes, we are infringing the license of DSM, because it says it can only be used on Synology hardware (hardware it is sold on). Coming back to the initial question with some answers and no solution I have bought a licence for the 3-rd cam which worked well on DS112 box. The same licence worked also on baremetal Xpenology 6.02. Now I have gone over to ESXi based environment and the licence does not activate anymore, giving the 'connection failed' error I have tried SN and MAC pair generated by the excel file available in the net.
I have also tried the original MAC and SN from the DS112, with still the connection failed message at activation the licence. Might be that there are some detection mechanisms for non genuine HW. I also tried to fall back to the oldest possible surveillance station with no success. My workaround: I am running separate Xpenology instance on ESXi for every pair of cameras. Not very convenient as they have separate timelines. Still looking for a more permanent solution, and I'm ready to buy more licences if I get it working. Coming back to the initial question with some answers and no solution I have bought a licence for the 3-rd cam which worked well on DS112 box.
The same licence worked also on baremetal Xpenology 6.02. Now I have gone over to ESXi based environment and the licence does not activate anymore, giving the 'connection failed' error I have tried SN and MAC pair generated by the excel file available in the net. I have also tried the original MAC and SN from the DS112, with still the connection failed message at activation the licence. Might be that there are some detection mechanisms for non genuine HW. I also tried to fall back to the oldest possible surveillance station with no success. My workaround: I am running separate Xpenology instance on ESXi for every pair of cameras. Not very convenient as they have separate timelines.
Still looking for a more permanent solution, and I'm ready to buy more licences if I get it working. The reason it no longer works is because Synology have changed their T&C's around moving licences, even on genuine hardware.
License Activation and Restrictions In Surveillance Station, go to Main Menu License then click Add. An installation wizard will guide you through adding device licenses into Surveillance Station. The license key can only be applied to one Synology product, however to satisfy special requirements from users, each license key can be migrated once. Note: Online connectivity is required for license activation. License migration count is restricted to one since Surveillance Station 8.0. If there are more than one Synology product under the CMS setup, the included device license can be shared among the CMS cluster.
Learn more about CMS. So synology, how come this change hasn't been advised to end users and what about 'old' licences that had been brought before you made these changes to the terms? If Synology are going to put such heavy restrictions on the camera licences, then they need to slash the prices! Not happy at all. UPDATE Synology now limits the licence to ONE device, from the page as of. Froggergolf wrote:Thanks for sharing. I was looking at a rs2146 and 46 more additional licenses if my trial is successful, but this makes one wonder about the support.
For a point solution like that, you'll be fine and not run into licence issues, unless you plan on changing the NAS hardware on a regular basis. The SS8 changes more impact home users who may upgrade a bit more often.
Ie buy a 2 buy unit, then upgrade to a 4 bay and then a few years later to a faster unit would = blocked licence! Synology email support, while never fast, have always been very helpful and worked to resolve issues I've had over the years.
This really sucks. Our small company bought DS411 years ago and a 4 camera license. Few years ago we bought DS1513+ and transferred that license easily to the new device and bought some new licenses too. Now we bought another device (DS416play) and today I installed Surveillance Stsation 8 into it and deactivated one 4 camera license from the DS1513+ and then tried to add it into DS416play. License got locked.lots of swearing. Then I tried to add it back to the DS1513+ but same result.
Now we have one 4 camera license that does not work at all. How in hell should we have known that trying to install it into new device locks the license for good? (And yes, the license was bought from more than valid retailer in Germany.) Pure stupidity Synology! I really hope to get good response from support.
Created ticket today. Nyknicks8 wrote:So synology does not want users to upgrade diskstations and rather have them switch to a different brand? Why does the license only migrate once? Do I get a refund for the license once I cannot use it anymore? This is fraud.
For EXISTING users who brought these licences before the SS8 licence changes. Synology has brought in 'new conditions' on existing licences without warning, without the user agreeing and without bothering to put the change in the CHANGE LOG. These actions make it fraud in my country! I want by supporting a company the behalves like this! Watch 'valid' owners turn to 'cracks' to get SS to work as per the licence they paid for!
Nyknicks8 wrote:So synology does not want users to upgrade diskstations and rather have them switch to a different brand? Why does the license only migrate once? Do I get a refund for the license once I cannot use it anymore? This is fraud. For EXISTING users who brought these licences before the SS8 licence changes. Synology has brought in 'new conditions' on existing licences without warning, without the user agreeing and without bothering to put the change in the CHANGE LOG. These actions make it fraud in my country!
I want by supporting a company the behalves like this! Watch 'valid' owners turn to 'cracks' to get SS to work as per the licence they paid for!
I've never see anything that indicates that this even applies to old licenses. Have you reached out to Synology for clarification? I guess raging on the forums is more entertaining than doing that, though.
Bluesync wrote:I'm gonna write a complaint to the reseller and see how he reacts. Yep I agree its crap, I also would be upset if my licences got blocked for no reason as well. I'm not saying you knew that you brought fake licences, I'm just saying that if your licences have become blocked, history has shown us there is a very good chance somewhere in the supply chain bad licences got inserted unknowingly to everyone and ended up in your hands. See above, yes its crap for you and yes doesn't help you out either. As I said in posts before, I really think Synology should look at tossing some 'good will' here for those that bought licences via valid/approved resellers and replace the licences for free.
Sure, write a letter to your supplier and see what they say. But first I would write to synology and ask them to confirm they are invalid licences. Send this reply along to your supplier and ask for 'replacement' licences, as you had been sold counterfeit ones. Braca grim bajke pdf. Nyknicks8 wrote:so you dont succumb to fraud by synology. Still don't get it do you.
Synology hasn't done any 'fraud' to you directly. They have blocked licence keys that have been abused by others. You're just the victim of this abuse, but are too silly to know where to direct your rage. Question for you. Would you jump up and down at Nike if you brought knock off shoes via a 3rd party and demand a new pair from Nike? As this is what you're asking. Instead of searching for 'hacks', why don't you go look up the meanings of some of these words you keep tossing around and using wrongly.
Nyknicks8 wrote:so you dont succumb to fraud by synology. Still don't get it do you. Synology hasn't done any 'fraud' to you directly. They have blocked licence keys that have been abused by others. You're just the victim of this abuse, but are too silly to know where to direct your rage.
Visual basic 2010 full version. Question for you. Would you jump up and down at Nike if you brought knock off shoes via a 3rd party and demand a new pair from Nike? As this is what you're asking.
Instead of searching for 'hacks', why don't you go look up the meanings of some of these words you keep tossing around and using wrongly. You still don't get it. I bought it from amazon.com - sold and shipped. They're an authorized dealer. If amazon itself sold me a fake license, synology should honor it and sue amazon. And why did it work for 4 years?
How did my legitimate license become fake after so long. It was ok when upgrading from SS 6 to 7, then upgrading the diskstation itself. Now when I update from 7 to 8 it became counterfeit. I doubt it had anything to do with counterfeit and more to do with upgrading the diskstation and synologys poor implementation and instructions. I only blame synology and they should pay the price. TDimi wrote:I never considered the potential risk of licensing when investing so much. Its a very small number of people reporting issues.
So I wouldn't skip using the product based on a few users here and there. Even with the mass crack down of v6-7 licence upgrade issues, the number of users who complained about licence issues was sub 100 in the threads. So out of the many many many units there, less than a 100 had issues.
Its a 'nothing' really. The problem is the risk associated with the investment and the potential of having licenses marked as invalid. Now lets clarify some points - I dont have any issues with purchasing potentially invalid keys from some online bulk store or using a keygen BUT what worries me is this scenario: I sell a surveillance solution to a customer - there seems that there is the potential for an irate customer to make contact demanding what have I done - selling a solution that no longer works OR selling invalid licenses which resulted in the 24x7 surveilance system no longer providing 24x7 coverage. So to the keep the customer happy I have to invest time to identify, communiate with Synology and the customer with a likely outcome that you purchase more licenses just to keep the paying customer happy while the problem is being addressed / resolved by Synology. How do you recover the lost time in terms of billables and needless to say recover the additional license purchase. What if Synology come back and say oops!!! Great BUT in the eyes of the customer the damage is already done and your reputation potentially tarnished.
This was my motive in making my post. Purchase a 4k NVR and it does not have a licensing component.
In my own situation a 4k 16Ch NVR is around 650-700 add a few WD Purples say another 350 and thats it. If I go the Synology route the licensing alone is around 300 (4 Camera) or 450 (8 Camera). Interesting debate but it does not seem to be a viable solution for 8 to 16 camera's AND the risk of an outage due to licensing discrepancy just pushes it over the edge BUT hey I have learnt a great deal from this thread in terms of risk mangement. Peace readers - hope things work out and if anything maybe Synology should have some type or priority paid support for 24x7 solutions or simply do not allow camera licenses to be purchased anywhere other than directly from Synology in your region.
TDimi wrote:The problem is the risk Don't disagree. And thanks for explaining your view. But everything has risks.
I feel the chances of your licences being blocked if buying from APPROVED suppliers TODAY, would be extremely low. We are talking well under 100 people reporting blocked keys out of millions of NAS units sold. All keys reported blocked have a purchase date from 2+ years ago. I haven't heard of any recent keys purchases being blocked.
So 2+ years ago was before synology started blocking keys, when people thought they could just pump out the same key to every man and his dog and no one would notice! Anyhow, your NVR unit has a risk of dropping dead and not supplying 24x7 too. So no solution is fail safe, and you have weigh up the pros and cons of each. Oh One way to massively reduce the risk, is stop the synology unit from auto updating. TDimi wrote:The problem is the risk Don't disagree. And thanks for explaining your view.
But everything has risks. I feel the chances of your licences being blocked if buying from APPROVED suppliers TODAY, would be extremely low. We are talking well under 100 people reporting blocked keys out of millions of NAS units sold. All keys reported blocked have a purchase date from 2+ years ago. I haven't heard of any recent keys purchases being blocked. So 2+ years ago was before synology started blocking keys, when people thought they could just pump out the same key to every man and his dog and no one would notice! Anyhow, your NVR unit has a risk of dropping dead and not supplying 24x7 too.
So no solution is fail safe, and you have weigh up the pros and cons of each. Oh One way to massively reduce the risk, is stop the synology unit from auto updating. Yes I agree with all of your responses - everything has risk associated and not running beta or auto updating production systems. I personally think it would be possibly easier to replace/recover from a dead or problematic NVR.
The problem is do you consolidate and leverage the advantages of consolidation at the expense of significant increase to risk (BIG BANG) or take the appliance route and have many more risks to mitigate the 'BIG BANG' at the expense of administration, possibly complexity and financial investment. Who knows - it always comes down to what your are trying to achieve in terms of outcomes, deliverables and budget - never an easy answer. I think the problems is process: 1. Synology - do not terminate licenses BUT allow the customer 14 or 28 days to respond so any potential licensing related issue which would ultimately result in outage can be managed accordingly. Synology - possibly have an online portal for registering/managing licenses. This might yield an outcome where by abused licenses can be flagged hopefully immediately. Maybe the process could be you enter the license and if not flagged as invalid you have 30/60/90 days to complete the process of validating license legitimacy.
My configuration: DS1815+ 6GB Memory - 2xSamsung 850 EVO PRO 256GB SSD R/W cache - 4xWD RED 3TB - 2xWD PUR 3TB and another 4xWD RED 3TB waiting for the purchase of the DX513 expansion chassis. 1500VA UPS NetgearGS724Tv4 ProSafe 24-port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switch Cisco WS-C2960-24PC-L - POE switch for camera's Camera's - Hikvision 4MP EXIR Turrets - H.264+ (two connected at present using free licenses to test Surveillance Station) expect final configuration to be 8 to 10 camera's with a couple 6MP in the mix. Briboynyc wrote:Stop with the accusations of counterfeit keys. I've never accused ANYONE of counterfeiting, please get your facts straight.
It is what it is. If your keys have stopped working, then Synology has deemed them to be counterfeit/pirated/abused and have been added to a blacklist of 'bad' keys. Simple as that.
If they have stopped working highly likely you have been a victim of counterfeiting entering the supply chain somewhere. This is not a mass reported issue. Sub 100 users between the V6- v7 upgrade and now the v7-v8 upgrade. Yozz wrote:Today I upgraded on my DS916+ Surv. Station to Version 8.0.0.-5122 with my 4 pack license.
After upgrading my licenses got invalid and are blocked when I remove/add the key again. I have a legit key and still have the license key card. I sended out a report like 30 minutes ago to tech support. I posted earlier in this thread, as I had this problem with the 8 Beta. I reluctantly applied the official 8 release today hoping they fixed the issue, but I am back in the same boat now as well. Also opened a ticket and pretty much expecting them to tell me to bugger off like they did the last time, but maybe I'll get lucky. I unfortunately never saved my license key card, not that is seems to make a difference for some others that have also contacted support.
Let's see what happens! I got positive respons from synology support. After I've had submitted a scan of the original license key card + the receipt from purchase, they have unblocked my license keys and all is working again for me. In my case it turned out that when I bought the DS916+ unit, I should not just have swapped my disks from the old unit, but also had to uninstall the license jet from the old unit prior to swapping disks. When you enter your license key, it will get locked with the serialnumber of your device. I hope this will help others, too.
License Activation and Restrictions In Surveillance Station, go to Main Menu License then click Add. An installation wizard will guide you through adding device licenses into Surveillance Station. The license key can only be applied to one Synology product, however to satisfy special requirements from users, each license key can be migrated once. Note: Online connectivity is required for license activation.
License migration count is restricted to one since Surveillance Station 8.0. /sizeIf there are more than one Synology product under the CMS setup, the included device license can be shared among the CMS cluster. Learn more about CMS. So basically this new find as part of SS8 changes everything. Back in the SS6-SS7 synology the blocked keys are because of counterfeit but it seems now with SS8 they seem to be locking down and wanting users to buy 'new' ones. This is totally unacceptable change to the licence agreement.
Plus we're going to see a stream of 'issues' around this two usage policy for users who reinstall DSM, get warranty replacements or upgrade that licences suddenly stop working without warning. It'll drive more users to the 'darker' side on how to get free licences. With products like milestone offering 8 cameras FREE, unlimited recording, full use of mobile apps etc, I will be reluctant to continue down the synology path when/if my licences fail. I'm looking at about $400USD in replacement costs for new licences. Sure lock down licences so they can only be active on one NAS at a time, got no issues with that!
But don't turn licences into a 'leasing' product. But looking at the recent synology changes, they want to nickel and dime everyone all the way. Level380 wrote:So basically this new find as part of SS8 changes everything. Back in the SS6-SS7 synology the blocked keys are because of counterfeit but it seems now with SS8 they seem to be locking down and wanting users to buy 'new' ones. This is totally unacceptable change to the licence agreement. Plus we're going to see a stream of 'issues' around this two usage policy for users who reinstall DSM, get warranty replacements or upgrade that licences suddenly stop working without warning.
It'll drive more users to the 'darker' side on how to get free licences. With products like milestone offering 8 cameras FREE, unlimited recording, full use of mobile apps etc, I will be reluctant to continue down the synology path when/if my licences fail. I'm looking at about $400USD in replacement costs for new licences.
Sure lock down licences so they can only be active on one NAS at a time, got no issues with that! But don't turn licences into a 'leasing' product. But looking at the recent synology changes, they want to nickel and dime everyone all the way. It all sounds very disturbing. Now if surveillance station was merely a nice to have then the availability is not as high concern BUT given these are solutions being used for commercial use is very unsettling. I agree with your comments and it seems Synology should have consulted and communicated better with its customers.
Synology Surveillance Station License Pack
I don't think I am confident in recommending this solution for commercial installation whereby I am the consultant/installer given the content/discussion in this thread.