I’m running out of space. My Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ (originally provided by Synology, thank you!) is at 89% full. Rather than waiting until it actually runs out, I decided it was time to upgrade one of the drives.

Because I’m running SHR RAID, I can have different sized disks. All my disks in the unit are shucked from Western Digital (WD) or Seagate external enclosures – because it’s cheaper to do that than buy disks outright. This time I’ve bought an 18TB WD drive, which takes about two minutes to remove from it’s case. (Note that before removing, I always test the drive to make sure it’s not DOA. WD and Seagate should still honour the warranty anyway if a drive fails later, and I’ve done this on a shucked WD drive before successfully).

Synology have an article on what to do to replace a disk with a larger one, which is worth reading for other considerations around the process: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_expand_replace_disk?version=6

This NAS supports hot swapping the disks, so I don’t need to do any prep or power it down – just make sure you have a backup in case it all goes wrong (which you should have anyway if you care about the data).

Here’s a quick video of the drive swapover:

On the Synology itself – Before the upgrade:

10TB drive has been taken out, Synology starts beeping in a concerning way due to being in a degraded state:

New drive inserted:

Using the Action > Repair option to start the rebuild

Then comes the waiting game for the repair, which took about two days to complete:

Note that adding a single 18TB disk is wasting some of the space. If you look at their RAID calculator (which right now goes up to 16TB only but will still show the problem) before taking out the 10TB in bay 6:

Swapping the 10TB to a 16TB only gives 2TB more available space, and 4TB unused, because it hasn’t got available capacity anywhere to mirror all the space the 18TB disk had:

However, if we drop out another 10TB for another 16TB, we see the available space jump up to 60TB and no unsued space. This will be my plan, order another 18TB drive to shuck which should take me all the way up to 62TB available space.

For home use, I really like the Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) because it provides actual redundancy, as well as easy expansion. I don’t have to commit to buying a bunch of drives at once of all the exact same size, and can gradually increase if and when I need more space. The process of upgrading a disk is so easy too that it’s not an inconvenience when upgrade time comes around.

Ubiquiti sent me two of their newly released Unifi Access Point WiFi 6 Long-Range (U6-LR) units – long range access points that support the Wi-Fi 6 standard. I’ve been using the setup Ubiquit sent me about a year ago which included a Unifi Access Point nanoHD (UAP-nanoHD). I was going to start by changing that over to one of these newer units to see how it went.

First, the unboxing. I don’t bother about this too much usually when reviewing hardware, but there’s a fair bit of attention to detail here. A mounting guide for the screw holes that includes a tiny spirit level, the detailed hole explanations on the plate, and the hardware kit – an assortment of screws and brackets that come in a nice sleeved foam holder, so you don’t inevitably drop something when you would normally find these in a plastic bag to rip open.

The size difference of the Access Point nanoHD vs Access Point WiFi 6 Long-Range is substantial (and is a bit over 3x as heavy):

Comparing the specs between the two:

NanoHD:

• Four-Stream 802.11ac Wave 2 Technology
• Simultaneous Dual-Band Radios
• Supports 200+ Concurrent Users
• 5 GHz Band 4×4 Multi-User MIMO with Radio Rate of 1.733 Gbps
• 2.4 GHz Band 2×2 MIMO with Radio Rate of 300 Mbps
• Powered by Gigabit 802.3af PoE

U6-LR:

• 1.3 GHz dual-core processor (now upgraded to support full-duplex 1 Gbps TCP/IP performance)
• Four-stream high-efficiency Wi-Fi 6 technology
• 5 GHz band 4×4 MU-MIMO and OFDMA with radio rate of 2.4 Gbps
• 2.4 GHz band 4×4 MIMO with radio rate of 600 Mbps
• Powered with 802.3at PoE (PoE injector not included)

Both units at the time of writing are the same price of $179US. Beyond the Wi-Fi 6 functionality on the U6-LR, the radio rates are higher and denser on it too. It’s worth noting the U6-LR has a the updated PoE requirement (also known as PoE+) and does not come with a PoE injector; if you’re already using a PoE+ switch like I am, this isn’t an issue. Otherwise, order a US$12 PoE Injector with the 802.3at standard

Swapping over the units was incredibly easy – I hadn’t mounted the NanoHD since moving, and may end up mounting this one once I’ve been using it for a bit and know I’m happy with it.

When I say it was easy; after swapping the network cable over, I logged onto the UniFi Dream Machine (UDM) web interface, went to the network devices page, and clicked ‘Adopt device’ that popped up. About a minute passed, and the device was now under control:

There was an update available, which upgraded the device from 5.43.15.12477 to 5.60.9.12980. I decided to add the second U6-LR on, but this time it would take over the Wi-Fi duties of the UDM; I adopted it into the UDM, then went into the WiFi settings for both the 2.4ghz and 5ghz networks, created a new AP Group, and ticked all but the UDM and applied (I have separate WiFi network names for the different bands due to an issue with a 2.4ghz only device that wouldn’t work when both bands were used on the same name).

Once I had done all this and let the connections settle down, the experience across each wireless AP was 92% or better. My Samsung Galaxy S21 shows a little ‘6’ next to the WiFi symbol.

I’ll take a few days living with this to see if there’s any issues that pop up, or if I notice any improvements (one sore point was a Chromecast that would dip in video quality now and then).

It’s been going very well. No dropouts or hiccups of any sort, and I’m noticing on my mobile that I stay on 4 bars around the house rather than dropping to 3 in some areas – which makes sense now being on a long range access point.

Also I found this video also looking at the UniFi 6 LR which has some extra info and visuals:

Microsoft Mechanics just released a video about how to set up Microsoft Teams Phones which as always, is a good high level technical overview of something Microsoft is doing. Here’s the video:

Personally, I’ve been living with using Microsoft Teams as the phone system for PSTN calls for about 6 months now, after coming from Skype for Business On-premises. There are some aspects that do ‘just work’, but there’s also limitations to be aware of. For reference, I’m using it via Telstra’s TCO365 service, which may give a bit of a different experience to others not using it this way. For example, I can’t get PSTN call logs via Teams itself:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-analytics-and-reports/pstn-usage-report

Pros:

I don’t have to worry about any gateways

With Skype for Business On-Premises, we had multiple gateways to convert the SIP calls into SfB. It’s now all happening in the cloud, I just have a range of numbers provided by the telco that turn up in Teams and can allocate them, along with the user requiring the right Micrsoft license, and the TCO365 license. There’s no specialist knowledge required to maintain any gateways, and reduces complexity of the environment. The gateways were mostly set and forget – but still needed work do to manual updates. If one had a fault, it’d be a pain to resolve.

Microsoft Teams Client

This will also appear as a con later, but everyone already uses the Microsoft Teams client for meetings – so the learning curve isn’t as bad compared to using another platform. It very much leads into the notion that beyond email, Teams is trying to be the single pain of glass for immediate interactions and communications. The client receives constant updates which can bring quality of life improvements.

Teams Admin Portal

The admin portal is generally a lot nicer to use than the old Skype for Business portal, which ran on Silverlight. It is constantly changing and being updated, and has grown in stability since I started using it 6 months ago. There’s a lot more that can be done in there around usage and reporting, and client health. There’s still plenty of improvements that can be made, but for the most part it does work.

Feature Updates

Not having to patch Skype for Business servers is great – a standard benefit of on-premises vs SaaS. The less things we have to manage for no real benefit, the better. When those updates come through, they’re regular, and bring new options to the platform. The client updates of course bring many more features too – but be weary of release dates. When something gets released in June 2021, it probably means that Microsoft are starting to roll it out then, and may take a few months to get to your tenant.

Calling Queues and Auto Attendants

The range of options around these is a lot greater in Teams – you can have a lot of scenarios covered and more complicated rulesets on how to handle calls. Members of a calling queue can also optionally have the toggle in their client if they want to be a part of it or not, which is handy to give end users the ability to jump in and out.

Cons:

Microsoft Teams Client

A double edged sword – it is nowhere near as slick and well designed as Skype for Business was for purely making phone calls. The interface is huge, becuase it’s designed to do so much; but the phone aspect still feels like an afterthought that constantly changes. Doing something simple like clicking in the field to dial a number, typing it and pressing enter does not call the number. You have to press enter twice – but not straight away, that won’t work, you have to wait for it to pop up a dialog showing it’s got the number ready to dial, then press enter again. Or, you can then go to the mouse and click call, which to me isn’t as good since I just used the keyboard to type a number in. Clicking all the digits of a phone number isn’t fun.

The Teams client is still memory hungry, has a lot of weird bugs (at one stage, the Calls icon just wouldn’t show which makes it very hard to make calls!). A whole re-write of the Teams client will come out at some stage, so hopefully that runs a lot better.

Desk Phones

This is another aspect that feels like it doesn’t get enough attention and effort. The Teams app that runs on Android will power any desk phone, and it’s not instantly quick to respond. It’s good enough, but not great. Many phones still don’t support being automatically updated via Teams, but will support a manual update. Part of the desk phone experience comes down to which third party vendor you pick, but features like being able to swap a PSTN call between desk phone and PC are still coming – these should have been there from day 1.

Unassigned Number

On Skype for Business, there was a great feature that would redirect calls of unallocated numbers in number ranges to another number – so if someone left, their calls would go to reception. This isn’t available in Teams at all, if you want to recreate the feature, you’ll have to pay license and phone company fees for every single number you’d like to do this to. A real pain.

Calling Queues and Auto Attendants

Although another positive, the internal Teams support for this is poor. If you try to look up the name of a calling queue in Teams, it won’t come up. So, if you create a Helpdesk group and expect internal staff to be able to type ‘Helpdesk’ in to find and call them, you can’t. I’m really disappointed on this one. The workaround is to fully license an account called Helpdesk, and set that to divert all it’s calls to the calling queue number.

There’s a bunch more points to consider, if you want to see a comparison on features for Skype for Business vs Teams in it’s multiple iterations of phone support (Teams Calling Plan, Teams Direct Routing, Teams Operator Connect) check out Luca Vitali’s constantly updated feature comparison table

I am looking forward to seeing how Teams Phones progresses and becomes a stronger product; in it’s current state be aware of the existing limitations and if it meets your requirements. It’s also worth seeing what’s on the roadmap for Teams and Phones to know what’s coming.