Yesterday i came home to find that i could no longer access my Synology Disk-station Manager. All the network shares were still available to browse, and the Synology Assistant detected and reported the DS to be working normally. Even the hosted websites were available, so it didn’t appear to be a web-server or SQL issue, but for whatever reason, i couldn’t access the Synology web admin page.

I decided to reboot the disk-station manually, as this usually solves 99% of all technical issues (doesn’t it?)

The Disk-station restarted without any drama (no errors, beeps or flashing lights). I tried the Disk-station Manager again but was still unable to access  it. Even more concerning however, the file-shares were now unavailable, and the hosted websites were down. The Synology Assistant now showed the system status as ‘System configuration is lost’.

I was shocked and confused, how could the tried and tested technique of switch it off and back on again possibly make matters worse? Nothing in the world made sense any more.

On searching the support forums I found this guide on “How to reset disk station”.

At this point my primary concern is losing my data, but at the top of the page it states very reassuringly:

Note: You won’t lose any data during reset. In case of any accidental data loss, it’s strongly recommended you back up your data before performing the operating system installation.

I followed the instructions, opened Synology Assistant, double clicked the disk-station and re-installed the lost firmware. I had to download the latest firmware from the Download Center first, which you can do by looking for your disk-station model in the list and downloading “DSM”, save the .pat file on your PC  and then just point Synology Assistant to the file and press next.

It then asked me if I wanted to use the default set-up or step by step set-up. I chose step by step, to make sure it wasn’t going to wipe all the data.

On the next page I entered my Disk-station name, the IP address, subnet mask and DNS servers. You can opt for dynamic if you prefer, if you don’t have any custom network preferences.

After clicking next it starts the reinstall process, which includes wiping the system partition and copying the new DSM package over to the NAS. Thankfully the wipe data partition box was greyed out. Phew!.

The process only took a few minutes, and then rebooted my NAS.

Based on the documentation I was expecting my users and permissions to have been lost, but as it happened none of the system configuration had changed, all the users and permissions were intact and the file shares and websites were once again accessible.

There were some additional problems accessing the Download Manager, Audio Station and Photo Station. Specifically when i tried to open Download Station i received the error message:

‘Connection Failed, Please Check your network settings’.

When i opened Audio Station there was no music or playlists, and when i opened Photo Station i got the error message:

'SQLSTATE[08006] [7] could not connect to server: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?'

I couldn’t find any solutions searching the web so i logged a ticket with Synology Support. They were fantastic as always and got back to me the next day with a working solution which was to delete ‘.profile’ from File Station > homes > admin and then restore the config from backup again. The last problem i had was with phpMyAdmin. I was unable to login to the admin page, every time i attempted to login i received the following error message:

#2002 - Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)
The server is not responding (or the local server's socket is not correctly configured).

I also noticed the following error when loading the WordPress dashboard and when clicking on certain pages or links within my blog:

'Error establishing a database connection'

Synology Support couldn’t help me with this but i did find a solution on-line, which was to change ‘localhost’ to the loopback address in both the phpMyAdmin config and WordPress config:

For phpMyAdmin i had to change the following line of code in config.inc.php

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '127.0.0.1';

/** MySQL hostname */

define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1');

That was it, everything was now back to how it was prior to the original error ‘System configuration is lost’.