Where is the Synology control panel? After clicking through the entire menu in DSM7, you flip through these five pages for 90% of the work

Da Liu's DS920+ had been running for over half a year. A few days ago, I followed a tutorial to try to enable SSH. The tutorial said "Enter Control Panel." He spent ten minutes browsing the DSM desktop but couldn't find the entry. He took a screenshot and sent me a screenshot: "This system doesn't even have a Control Panel?" Yes, but it's hidden deeply. I remotely went over to take him to click through the icons one by one, then categorized them by function. After reading it, he said the truth: if someone had said it earlier, it would have saved him half a month's detours. This article will jot down this half-hour of activity to use as a map for beginners trying Synology.

first reveal where the panel is hidden: it's in the main menu, not on the desktop

DSM log in, you'll find the desktop, with a single wallpaper and several suite icons. By default, the Control Panel is not on the desktop; it is located in the dot matrix icon at the top left corner of the screen. Hovering the mouse over prompts "Home Menu." Opening it reveals a magnified icon wall, with the control panel on the front row. The gear and wrench icons are instantly recognizable. If you find tapping twice too much trouble, there's a faster way: enter 'Control Panel' in the search box at the top of the desktop, just type 'Control Panel' and press Enter to enter. Later, I taught Da Liu this trick. He said he stared at the search box for half a year and didn't notice it.

don't be scared by the icon wall after entering. The twenty or so icons look messy, but DSM7 actually divides the area by function, roughly five sections from left to right: information list, connectivity, file sharing, system, and applications. The partition names vary slightly between versions; some firmware labels the connectivity field as Internet Connection, and the name is fixed on functionality. When I lead people to check the panel, the order is to first identify the area, then look for icons within the area, which is much faster than guessing each icon one by one.

information list and connectivity: one is the pipe management system itself, one is the gate of the pipe facing the outside

information list is managed by the system itself. updating and restoring here. System upgrades and exporting configurations as backup files all come from here. My rule for Da Liu is to upgrade as soon as you see a minor version, and wait for one or two minor versions before making changes. notifications are also here. Email alerts and mobile push notifications are all placed on this page. Their backup failure alerts were installed at the time, saving me three unnecessary detours of "the backup quietly crashes and no one knows."

connected to the door facing the outside. the most frequently flipped page external access, including QuickConnect and DDNS, and the route to take for remote connections home is basically determined by this page. The network interface card itself is set here to fix the static IP for the NAS. Once the address is fixed, the phone connects and port forwarding won't fail due to restarting and changing the address number. terminal and SNMP only have one checkbox: enable SSH. Only after checking it can you use the command line to work. That day, Liu spent half an hour fiddling to open this one. Security is also at the same level: two-step verification, automatic login failure blocking—these account defenses are all on that page. For machines I can touch on the public network, I first go to that page and enable two-step authentication.

system area is the most valuable: the four pages I flipped through most are all here

System section is the most valuable part of the entire control panel. I've browsed it more times in the past six months than in all other sections combined.

first page is called Hardware and Power, and one page contains five items: power schedule (scheduled power on/off), UPS settings, hard drive sleep , fan modes, beep control. My mom's backup machine only runs for seventy minutes a day, with the power plan set to turn on at 3:20 a.m. and shut down at 4:30 a.m.; On the UPS page, check "Safely shut down after power outage" to trip the circuit breaker so it won't damage the drive. I finished both pages on the day I assembled the device.

second page is task planning , where all the tasks that automatically run at midnight are registered: water level inspection, SMART short test, recycle bin cleaning—one line at a time, done on time. On the third page, users and groups, opening accounts and setting permissions for family members all enter through here. My photo library is like giving my mom a read-only account, which she can browse but not delete. Page 4: Technical Support Service Center, which collects system logs and packages them for customer service troubleshooting. Normally, you rarely encounter this once a year, but if something happens, it's the first to go.

File Sharing Area: Gates for data inflow and outflow

file sharing area should be separated between two pages; beginners tend to mix the two together. The File Service Management protocol, which is 'how you connect in': SMB for Windows computers for , NFS for Linux, WebDAV for phones to connect externally, with each page and switch independent of each other. When the Big Liu family's Win11 computer couldn't connect to the NAS, they had to change the server signature in the file service SMB advanced settings to "Client-defined" to fix it. This page has more pitfalls than it seems.

share folder directories and permissions, create new directories, encrypted safe , recycle bin switch all here. Let me add a bit more to the Recycle Bin: by default, it's not open. If you open it, files deleted by hand can be retrieved from it, but the cost is it takes up space. My photo directory is open, but the download directory is closed. snapshot entry is also in the file service. When you accidentally delete an entire directory, it's much more decent than recovery software—you can go back in seconds.

have three daily tasks that aren't even on the control panel

took Da Liu through five zones and asked: Where do you check the hard drive temperature? This question hits the nail on the head, not in the control panel. There are several things in DSM that are standalone programs used every day, accessed directly from the main menu, on par with the control panel—this is the most confusing aspect for Synology beginners.

storage manager is one of them. Hard drive health, temperature curve , storage pool downgrading RAID mode all on it, and no messes in the control panel's five zones. The log center is another type. Whoever connects to the NAS or what issues the system has encountered, you can query and export from the log center in the main menu. When you connection issues, you rely on it to speak . The third is Hyper Backup, which the full set of version backup settings. in the package's own interface, after installation, you can access it from the main menu. There is also an index service in the application area that manages file contents. To search for text in PDFs, you must first open the index.

my simple method is three steps: search for the settings name in the search box at the top right of the Control Panel. If you can't find it, go back to the main menu icon wall and take a look. If not, go to the Suite Center. After three steps, there's basically no job you can't find. In the tutorial, about half of the 'enter control panel' section actually refers to these packages.

regular users lose half the icons when they enter, isn't it a system failure

there's one more thing I must explain. Da Liu created an account for his wife. When she logged in, she saw the control panel was sparsely polite, thinking the system was broken. No. DSM's rule is that regular users can only see projects they have permission for; management settings like task planning, hardware, and power do not appear at all. You must log in with an administrator group account to get full access. I really like this design. My family mistakenly changed the system settings and blocked them at the root, and it also explained many people's "icons don't match the tutorial."

those looking through old tutorials, be careful: when upgrading from DSM6 to DSM7, many settings were relocated, so the positions in old articles may not match the current interface. If you really can't find it, just use the three steps above—it's much faster than flipping through tutorials one after another.

wrap up with a quick lookup sheet, and the commonly used tasks are directly matched:

order, just note once: first identify the five sections, then check the speed lookup; if you can't find it, search the top right corner, and if that's the worst case, go back to the main menu and package center to check. The control panel is a bit of a trick—once you try it, you're already familiar with it.