For use as a Web server, Synology provides a number of features. Figure 9 shows the Web Service setup screen.

Figure 9: Web Service setup

Along with variable port control, you can see options for turning on the MySQL server and a built-in photo album program (Photo Station). Once MySQL is turned on, you're pretty much on your own for management, but Synology provides a pointer to phpMyAdmin, a free PHP-based MySQL management program. Installation of the admin program was just a matter of downloading and unpacking into the Web server share and going through a little bit of configuration. Figure 10 shows execution of the program while being served up from the DS-106e.

Figure 10: The PHP MySQLAdmin application

Using this tool, I was able to create and populate MySQL tables that could be accessed from PHP scripts. The combination of MySQL, PHP and a Web server brings an entire LAMP webserver to your network, which allows for sophisticated websites to be created.

Figure 11, a screen-shot of Synology's included photo album application, is an example of what you can do with a PHP application running on the DS-106e.

Figure 11: The photo station application

The photo-album application itself worked fairly well. Any photos deposited into the photo directory were automatically indexed and displayable thumbnails were generated. From there you could cycle through individual photos or run a nice automatic slide show. But the application did have some quirks, as shown in Figure 11 above. The "broken" thumbnail indicated a problem with one of my photos, but there was no other diagnosis to tell me what was wrong with this jpeg, which wasn't much different from the others.

Another option available under the Network menu was email alert notification. After this is set up you'll get email notifications when problems occur on the DS-106e. In my case the only notification I got was when I plugged in an external USB drive that was nearly full. Based on this warning, I would assume that I'd also get a warning when the main drive started to get full as well.