• Green screen within Synology Surveillance’s records

    If you have a green screen when watching records of Synology Surveillance Station on your mobile phone, or tablet, and are using H.264 compression, then simply disable the “H.264 hardware decoding”.

    Do you see something like this on your mobile ?

    Open the “DS Cam” App, click on the “three horizontal lines” top-left icon, and then on the gear icon:

    There, disable the “Hardware decoding”:

    Now, the image should be fine:

    Et voilร .

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  • Cannot pair Aqara or other Zigbee devices with Homey Pro?

    Pairing Aqara device (Zibgee) with Homey can sometimes be frustrating. And it’s actually the same with other Hubs… Here is my trick : keep the device awake by pressing shortly on the button every 5 sec.

    Click to Read More

    Usually, to pair an Aqara device (Zigbee) with your hub, you need to press the reset button until it starts flashing (usually 5 or 8 seconds depending on the model). However, often, nothing happens, and your hub will report that the pairing failed, even though you were close to the hub and made sure there were no Bluetooth devices communicating in the nearby area.

    In such cases, after the reset (explained above), press and release immediately the reset button once every 5 seconds. This will keep the device awake and maximize the chance of a successful pairing.

    Notice: Aqara devices are built by Lumi United Technology. Lumi is also producing the devices of Xiaomi. So, this trick is valid for most of them (and most ZigBee devices on battery)

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  • Use Gmail antispam with an OVH Mail Pro mailbox

    This is probably a dirty trick, but it works. All my emails are passed through a gmail intermediary mailbox, where Spams are deleted and remaining emails are forwared to my OVH mailbox.

    Click to Read More

    As partially explained here, I used to have a mailbox “MyUser@MyDomain” in a MX Plan of OVH to store all my emails and an email address “MyAddress@MyDomain” which was a redirection to a gmail mailbox “MyUser@gmail.com” (People are sending me emails only on “MyAddress@MyDomain”).

    All emails passed to “MyUser@gmail.com” are filtered (antispam), forwarded into my mailbox “MyUser@MyDomain” and archived at gmail (so a “backup” is kept there).

    My Outlook used to be configured with IMAP to fetch emails from “MyUser@MyDomain” and SMTP to sent emails “From: MyAddress@MyDomain”

    Unfortunately, mailboxes of MX Plan at OVH are limited to 5GB. So, I decided to migrate my mailbox “MyUser@MyDomain” to a “Mail Pro” account at OVH.

    First, while doing so, very important, I had to define the domain as “non-authoritative”ย  in the “Mail Pro” account !!! Otherwise, the “Redirections” defined in the MX Plan won’t work anymore.

    Next, I configured my new Mail Pro account in Outlook (NB.: this account, migrated from the MX Plan, still has the same name: “MyUser@MyDomain”). Unfortunately, once this Mail Pro account configured in Outlook, I couldn’t sent email “From: MyAddress@MyDomain” anymore. The reason is that “Mail Pro” does not know “MyAddress@MyDomain” which is defined in the MX Plan. Sending emails via the account “MyUser@MyDomain” but “From: MyAddress@MyDomain” is therefore considered as Spoofing by Mail Pro (NB.: it’s not the case within a MX Plan).

    If you don’t care about the gmail antispam filtering anymore, then you can simply:

    • Delete the Redirection “MyAddress@MyDomain” from the MX Plan.
    • Wait for 30 sec, to be sure the delete is executed.
    • Create an Alias “MyAddress@MyDomain” in your Mail Pro (it will fail if the delete is not yet executed. If this occurs, retry)

    To, instead, keep the mechanism above in place:

    • Create a new mailbox in the MX Plan, with simply 50MB, going to be used only to send emails via SMTP: “MyMail@MyDomain”
    • Configure Outlook:
      • To use “MyAddress@MyDomain” as “From”
      • IMAP with the account of Mail Pro (“MyUser@MyDomain”)
      • SMTP with the account of MX Plan (“MyMail@MyDomain”)

    It results into this schema:

    Disclaimer: an SME from the community OVH reports that not only OVH is sometimes blocking outgoing emails without notifications (as those are considered as Spams, but also Gmail is rejecting many incoming emails with unclear explanation for most standard users. As a consequence, some/many (?) emails could be “silently lost” with the mechanism above….

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  • Insta360 Studio crashes immediately when exporting

    ย 

    After upgrading to the version 4.9.1, from Insta360 Studio started to crash immediately after pressing the export button. A downgrade to 4.8.4 didn’t solve the issue. But using “CPU” instead of “Auto” as “Image Processing Acceleration” did the trick !

    Click to Read More

    I was expecting an issue with the Codecs and so I did first untick all the options enabled by default in related tab of the User Preference

    But that didn’t help. So I tried next to set “CPU” instead of “Auto” for “Image Processing Acceleration” in the Hardware Acceleration tab. And it solved the problem.

    I didn’t find any information on that flag on Insta360 forum…

    ย 

    NB: the error message from Insta360 when trying to export the video was something like : Error Code 1024

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  • Renewal of LetsEncrypt certificates on Synology after a move

    After exporting all my certificates from an old NAS to a new one, I realized that they were not renewed automatically anymore. Trying to renew them manually via the DMS UI (Control Panel > Security > Certificate), a zip file with a CSR file (Certificate Signing Request) and a Key file, was downloaded. I had no idea how to proceed with these, so I investigated why the automatic renewal was not working as on the old NAS. The reason was the lack of “renew.json” file on the new NAS.

    Click to Read More


    Before starting, I strongly advice to export all the certificates, one by one, using the DSM UIย  (Control Panel > Security > Certificate) !!!

    Connected on the NAS via SSH, I tried first to renew the certificates with the command: /usr/syno/sbin/syno-letsencrypt renew-all

    Looking into /var/log/messages, I noticed that syno-letsencrypt was complaining about a missing renew.json file :

    syno-letsencrypt[19750]: syno-letsencrypt.cpp:489 can not find renew.json. [No such file or directory][/usr/syno/etc/certificate/_archive/XXXXXX]

    NB.: To get more details, the verbose version of the renewal can be useful: /usr/syno/sbin/syno-letsencrypt renew-all -vv

    On Synology, there is one folder /usr/syno/etc/certificate/_archive/XXXXXX per certificate, where XXXXXX is the ID of the certificate. It is assumed to contain these files: cert.pem, chain.pem, fullchain.pem, privkey.pem and renew.json. And indeed, there was no file renew.json, in the folder XXXXXX

    So, on the old NAS, I looked for the folder AAAAAA containing the same certificate as in XXXXXX (once imported on another NAS, the certificate gets a new unique ID ). Check the file /usr/syno/etc/certificate/_archive/INFO to identify the ID of the certificate.

    Once the folder AAAAAA identified, read the file renew.json which looks like this:

    {
    "account" : "/usr/syno/etc/letsencrypt/account/BBBBBB/",
    "domains" : "<your domain>",
    "server" : "https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory",
    "version" : 2
    }

    BBBBBB is the folder containing your letsencrypt user account, stored in the file /usr/syno/etc/letsencrypt/account/BBBBBB/info.json (Notice: there can be several accounts if you used different contact emails for your various certificates).

    Look on the new NAS for the folder ZZZZZZ equivalent to BBBBBB (comparing the info.json files).

    Once AAAAAA and BBBBBB determined, I did create a file /usr/syno/etc/certificate/_archive/XXXXXX/renew.json on the new NAS, containing:

    {
    "account" : "/usr/syno/etc/letsencrypt/account/ZZZZZZ/",
    "domains" : "<your domain>",
    "server" : "https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory",
    "version" : 2
    }

    And finally, I could run successfully the renewal: /usr/syno/sbin/syno-letsencrypt renew-all -vv

    To update only one certificate (for testing purpose, it’s safer than renew-all), use the folder name XXXXX of the certificate : /usr/syno/sbin/syno-letsencrypt renew -c XXXXXX -vv

    Here attached, find a script created by ChatGPT to help in generating the renew.json files (Copy and run it into /usr/syno/etc/certificate/_archive/)

    renewCertificates

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    Attachments

  • How to identify a USB device

    You found a USB device (a dongle or whatever) but have no idea what it is ? USBDeview is the tool to help you in identifying that device.

    Click to Read More

    Here is what you must do to get information on your device:

    1. Download and store USBDeview on your PC
    2. In the same folder, store this file with an unofficial list of USB devices
    3. Run USBDeview and in the “View” menu, “Choose Columns”
    4. Sort the Columns to have: Device Name, Description, Device Type, Drive Letter, Serial Number, Registry Time 1 and 2, VendorID, ProductID, InstanceID
    5. Plug your USB device into your PC
    6. Look for the latest updated USB device in USBDeview (sorting on the column “Registry Time”). This is your device to be identified (you see several lines with the same timestamp, VendorID and ProductID)

    You can also get extra information on this web site, searching for the VendorID and ProductID. You can also use there software, temple, to find the name of the vendor if it was unknown for USBDeview: Run Temple and filter on the VendorID or ProductID to highlight the device (DO NOT TYPE ENTER, as it close temple). Ex.: for the ProductID 1701 here above, with an unknow vendor, Temple tell us that it is “Lester Electrical”:

    Does “Lester Electrical” ring a bell for you ? Then you found what’s this dongle.

    In many cases unfortunately, you can’t do any link between the vendor of the hardware (in the usb device) and what this device is actually used for. Here above, I finally figured out that this was the wireless dongle to connect one of my mini keyboard Rii mini i8 imported from China by RiiTek. But there was really no link between both…

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  • Nvidia : how to force detection of a Missing Display ?

    It happens regularly that my PC does not detect all of my 3 displays when starting. There are several options to fix this: reboot the PC, use Ctrl+WinKey+Shift+B, unplug and replug the cable of the missing display, or force Nvidia to detect that missing display.

    Click to Read More

    For the last option:

    1. Run the NVIDIA Control Panel
    2. Select “Set up multiple displays”
    3. Click “My display is not show”
    4. Turn off and on again your display
    5. Click “Rigorous Display Detection”

    ย 

    In many cases, the only option working fine is however to unplug and replug the cable of the missing display :/

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  • Setting distinct email user account and email address in Outlook

    Initially, with Outlook 2021, I couldn’t set my email account to use an email address “From” as I used to do it. All emails were sent from “MyUser@MyDomain on behalf of MyAddress@MyDomain”. To sent the mail from “MyAddress@MyDomain”, I had to configure my account via the email “Manage Profile” menu.

    Click to Read More

    I want to send my emails with “MyAddess@MyDomain” as a From, without specifying explicitly this address as “Reply To” (Because I want the recipients to see “MyAddress@MyDomain” as origin of my emails).

    But the account to login into my mailbox, at my domain provider, is “MyUser@MyDomain”.

    The reason is that I have configured “MyAddress@MyDomain” to be a forward to “MyUser@gmail.com”. And I have configured an autoforward of “MyUser@gmail.com” to “MyUser@MyDomain”. Doing so, I benefit of the gmail anti-spam and I have a copy in gmail of all my emails (just in case of DRP at my provider).

    So, a mail sent to me (MyAddress@MyDomain) is actually passed to Google (MyUser@gmail.com) before being forwarded into my mailbox (MyUser@MyDomain) as illustrated here under.

    The issue is that it’s not possible to configure Outlook 2021 to send email from “MyAddress” while connecting to the mailbox “MyUser” with its new configuration wizard.

    This new configuration wizard can be accessed via File > Account Settings > New :

    Even if you tick the option “Advanced options”, you will not be able to configure distinct “email address” and “email account”, as in previous versions of Outlook. You will be able to change a edit the “Account Name” and few other options, but the best that you can do is sent an email fromย  your “email account” on behalf of your “email address”ย  (I.e.: from MyUser@MyDomain on behalf of MyAddress@MyDomain)

    ย 

    The solution is to use instead : File > Manage Profiles > Email Accounts > New

    And then, configure your account as you used to do it in the past, with distinct “email address” and “user name” :

    Et voilร 

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  • Play Meta/Oculus VR Games with a HTC Vive VR headset

    My daughter wanted to play “Vader Immortal” which is only available on Meta Quest for Oculus, while I have a HTC Vive Pro 2.

    Installing “Revive” and starting the game from “VivePort” did the trick.

    Click to Read More

    If you have an HTC Vive, you should have “VivePort” and “SteamVR” installed already. The issue is that VR Games for Oculus (Rift) are compatible with SteamVR, but not available in Steam for Vive. But as explained on the web, there are tricks…

    ย 

    Download and install the “Oculus Rift Software” (using your old Oculus account, a Meta account or your Facebook account), but SKIP the hardware setup part !

    ย 

    Next, download and install the latest stable release of “Revive“. Once installed, close its Dashboard.

    ย 

    Then, open “Oculus” to install a free Game, for testing purpose.

    Go to Settings > Library Locations > Edit, to pick the folder where you want to store your games:

    Reminder: Just in case you want to use the same location as your games for Steam, this one can be found via Steam’s menu View > Settings > Downloads > Steam Library Folders

    ย 

    Go next into the Oculus Store > Top Free, and pick, for example, “Rรฉpulbique VR” to install it.

    ย 

    Once installed, you will obviously not be able to run it from the Oculus Dashboard, as you don’t have any compatible hardware. Instead, run “Steam VR”:

    And keeping both “SteamVR” and “Oculus” opened,ย  rerun “Revive”

    In the Dashboard of “Revive”, you should see your Oculus games.

    Click once onto one to run it. If it starts but closes suddenly soon after (wait a minute to be sure that it’s definitively closed, as most gamesย  “popup” again later) , run also “VivePort”:

    Just as a summary, you should now have SteamVR, Oculus, Revive and VivePort opened :ย 

    ย 

    In VivePort, you should see your new Oculus Games

    If you do not see them, close SteamVR, Oculus, Revive and VivePort (via the SysTray menu !!) and restart them: SteamVR, Oculus, Revive and VivePort. Also double check that your heaset and two remotes are turned on.

    Start the games from there. At least for me, they just runs fine. Only when run from Revive, they “auto-close” themselves without any notification.

    [PS: check the list of compatible games vader]

    Et voilร ,

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  • Setup DSM 7.1 in a Virtual Synology DS3622xs+ using VMWare

    Here is a step by step “How-To create a Virtual Machine to emulate a DS3622xs+ running DSM 7.1” using VMWare and a Loader from redpill

    Click to Read More

    I used a tutorial from internet to create a VM in VMWare 16 and exported this one as ovf. Using that ovf, you can easily setup your own VM with a DS3622xs+ running DSM 7.1.

    1: Download and unzip this package, containing:

    • the configuration of the virtual machine (dsm.ovf and two disk.vmk),
    • the boot file for DS3622xs+ (synoboot.vmdk) and
    • the image of the DSM 7.1 for DS3622xs+ (DSM_DS3622xs+_42661.pat)

    2: Open VMWare Workstation. If you never configured the default location where you want to create your Virtual Machines, press CTRL-P to open the โ€œPreferencesโ€ panel. There, set this default location (I am using E:\VMWare).

    3: Go next to “Windows Explorer”, in the folder where you have unzipped the package, and double click dsm.ovf. This is going to import the VM into VMWare. Type a name for the new virtual machine (I am using DSM3622xs+ 7.1) and click โ€œImportโ€.

    4: Here is the outcome to the importation. You can now click on โ€œPower on this virtual machineโ€. If you want, you may also first increase the Memory, the Processors or the size of the Hard Disk 2 and 3 (Do not touch the first Hard Diskย  which contains the boot loader).

    5: 5 sec after starting the VM, the bootloader will run:


    6: Open the โ€œSynology Assistantโ€, which is more efficient than the page http://find.synology.com to find your VM, and after +/- 3 minutes (depending on the perf of your PC) click on โ€œSearchโ€. If you didnโ€™t wait long enough, you will see an Error message (In such a case, check that you have enabled the option “Allow compatibility with devices that do not support password encryption” in the preferences – via the gear icon in the top-right corner – and/or click Search โ€œAgainโ€. I never had to do this more than 3 times).

    7: Finally, the Assistant will find your VM. A webpage should automatically open (Otherwise, double-click on the VM). Approve the EULA and click Install.

    8: Click next on Browse to select the image of the DSM 7.1 for DS3622xs+ and Select the file โ€œDSM_DS3622xs+_42661.patโ€ in the folder where you unzipped the package downloaded previously.

    9: Finally, click on โ€œNextโ€ and confirm that the installation can override the diskโ€ฆ (You can safely tick the “I understand…” itโ€™s the virtual Hard Disk member of the VM. No worry ๐Ÿ˜‰ )

    10: The installation will take a few minutes

    11: Once the installation complete, you will see in the VMWare Workstation that the VM is rebooting. On the installation page, you see a countdown.

    12: You should soon see that itโ€™s installing packages before being finally ready to “start”

    13: If you are requested to login into the VM, do it as “admin” without password and configure it. Next configure your new NAS (Do not accept automatic updates !!!).

    I did skip the creation of Synology account and didn’t agree on Device Analytics or the display of this Nas in the Web Assistant.

    14: Itโ€™s now time to use the Hard Disk 2 and 3 to create a first Volume. Open the DSM Main Menu and start the Storage Manager (Then, it’s just a next, next, next journey depending on which Disk Array you want).

    15: Et voila, you have now a brand new DS3266xs+ with the DSM 7.1-42661 (DO NOT UPGRADE !!! The NAS would go into a “Recoverable” and I have no resolution for that)