Station Manager

The applications menu is very interesting, so we dedicated a page to it. We will begin our tour in the Station Manager's menu.


You can enable or disable all QNAP Stations (Photo, Music, Multimedia, File, Download, and Surveillance Station) in Station Manager. We have already looked at these Stations in detail.


Backup Station offers many backup functions, which allows the NAS to serve as a backup server that provides backup space for all connected clients. Files stored on the NAS can also be backed up to external storage devices, remote devices, or the cloud through the Backup Station. Also enable the USB one-touch copy button at the front through these options to easily back data on USB devices up to the NAS and vice versa.


Use Backup Station to configure the NAS as a backup server, with remote replication, cloud backup, and external backup.


All MP3 files in the NAS' Multimedia folder can be shared through iTunes with this service.


Multimedia content on the NAS can be streamed to DLNA media players (e.g. TVs) if you enable the QNAP Media Server or TwonkyMedia DLNA Server option.


The Media Library service scans designated folders for multimedia files, like photos, videos, or music and indexes them into the media library. You should be careful with these options since frequent scans can significantly affect NAS performance, especially when combined with big network transfers. This service should ideally stop automatically once the network or CPU load is above a specified threshold, though this NAS' dual-core CPU will most likely easily handle the load.


This NAS can convert videos into different resolutions (240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p) pretty fast because of the transcoding features its CPU supports. Video files can be converted through the File Station, Photo Station, or Video Station, or into tH.264 with the MP4 extension. Simply switch to the Transcoding Task tab to manage any tasks you created. The transcoding service is also enabled by default.


You can host a web site on the NAS and manage it. This web server also supports Joomla!, PHP, and MySQL/SQLite.


This service allows an administrator to create users with access to multiple NAS servers, with the same username and password.


VPN (Virtual Private Network) is also supported by QTS, through which users can access the NAS and its resources on a private network over the Internet. Both PPTP and OpenVPN services are supported. You should configure your router and open the corresponding ports (port forwarding) for VPN to operate normally. This can be done automatically if you have a UPnP router.


This option allows you to configure a MySQL server on the NAS. It will act as a database server of another web server on a remote site.


The Syslog server will allow you to receive Syslog messages from clients.


The operating system includes an anti-virus program that will scan the NAS manually or on a schedule for infected files, malware, trojans, and other threats. Disabled by default, this feature has to be enabled manually.


For clients on the same network, the NAS can be used as a RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-in User Service) server for centralized authentication, authorization, and accounting management.


The TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server allows you to configure and manage devices on the network. It can also be used to remotely boot computers, for recovery or system imaging.


An option to have the NAS act as an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server has also been added.