So, I bought a Synology NAS DS 923+. Intended purpose is as a local storage device that can store backups of all my computers as well as serve media and data to various devices (so for example, if I want to access the reddit data files, I do not need to copy a couple of hundred GBs to a system).

It is not intended to be reachable from the internet - stuff that I would entrust my cloud provider with is uploaded via specific folders with Nextcloud to Hetzner.

Troubleshooting

VLC player cannot access smb links

KDE application can open files shared via SMB when clicking on them in the Dolphin file explorer. Other applications like VLC do not have access out-of-the-box. Solution: in VLC → Preferences → Show Settings (All) → Input / Codecs → Access Modules → SMB, you can enter the username/credentials for SMB file access.

Source: Dediomedo blog.

Firefox cannot open PDF

When clicking on a PDF in Dolphin, Firefox reports:

Zugriff auf die Datei wurde verweigert
Die Datei auf /run/user/1000/kio-fuse-dnAaGk/smb/synology.local/documents/abc.pdf ist nicht lesbar.
Sie wurde möglicherweise entfernt, verschoben, oder Dateiberechtigungen könnten den Zugriff verhindern.

Opening the file directly in Firefox via "open …​" and navigating to

/run/user/1000/kio-fuse-dnAaGk/smb/synology.local/documents/

works, and Firefox changes the link to

file:///run/user/1000/doc/a12b89c/abc.pdf

which is somewhat strange.

Solution: mount the SMB share as a regular folder via /etc/fstab by adding the line

//synology-nas/documents  /media/documents     cifs    uid=0,credentials=/home/ingo/.smb,iocharset=utf8,vers=3.0,uid=1000,gid=500 0 0
//synology-nas/other        /media/data      cifs    uid=0,username=xxx,password=yyy,iocharset=utf8,vers=3.0,uid=1000,gid=500 0 0

As you can see, you can either define your username & password in .smb in your home directory or directly in /etc/fstab.

Format of .smb:

user=ingo
password=my_password
domain=WORKGROUP

(Workgroup seems to be the default)

Note: You also need to have cifs-utils installed.

Source: Tim Lehr, Ben Koren and a Synology forum post, various posts about kio-fuse and smb-problems:

Initial version: 2023-02-24