Tonky will not support NAS users!

[JimR]

I have Twonky on my QNAP NAS. I logged a support question via their web site last week and have just received a reply saying they provide no support for users such as me.

Poor or what?

[Briain]

Hi JimR

Not really; there are three situations to consider (and your one is officially supported by the Qnap support team):

Twonky supported versions (retail versions):

There are basically two branches of Twonky products; a retail one and a wholesale one. Twonky versions for PC's and Mac's are sold directly by Twonky; these are thus 'retail' products and they are fully supported by the Twonky folks.

Third party vendor supported versions (wholesale versions):

Twonky also make wholesale products for the NAS and router vendors, and these are packaged up (or even re-branded) by the NAS/router vendors and bundled within their products firmware (it effectively becomes part of their devices operating system). As it becomes just another part of the functionality of the NAS/router firmware, it is the NAS/router vendor who then has to support it. That also makes sense in that the NAS/router vendors might set certain parameters to make it better suit their own devices (examples being cache size and location or disk hibernation tweaks in NAS's) so the NAS/router vendors are the ones who will best know their own versions of the Twonky builds.

This is why Netgear had to sort out the broken ReadyNAS and NV's which had Twonky 4 installed on them. Though the package was downloaded from the Twonky site, it was to Netgear's specification, and as it was Netgear that got it wrong, they had to fix the NAS's by remotely logging on to them.

Unsupported 'experimenters' builds (unofficial versions):

There are other builds available on the Twonky site (things like the D-Link DNS323 build) but these are clearly marked as being for experimenters only as most will need custom tweaks to the installation package (like symlinks) and possibly to the startup script, in order to correctly install and run them (and thus they are totally unsupported). That's why I tend to recommend Qnap NAS's as the new ReadyNAS builds (on the ReadyNAS forum) are excellent, but they are not supported by anyone (so you are on your own when it goes wrong, thought it doesn't go wrong any more so that's no great issue) whereas the Qnap builds are covered under the overall Qnap NAS support umbrella.

It's worth noting that Twonky originally intended dropping ALL the NAS 'experimenters' builds, but myself and others pleaded with them to keep them available (and updated) so folks like Super-Poussin (Netgear forum) could build ReadyNAS add-ons (and on this forum, I've posted instructions on how to install it onto the D-Link NAS). So these really are classed as 'experimenters' builds and are definitely not supported by anyone!

Bri

[Pollensa1946]

(2012-06-26 12:56)JimR Wrote:  Poor or what?

Well my answer to that question is... QNAP support in my experience has been excellent. So you need to explain exactly what your problem is so we can judge correctly.
Or (on re-reading) are you saying that it's TWONKY support that's the problem?

[Briain]

Hi

I think he logged a support question directly to Twonky, but as explained above, that's the wrong process; it has to be asked of Qnap as it is them who support the Qnap-specific versions of Twonky.

Obviously, Qnap and Twonky do talk to each other, so any bugs that impact on the Twonky written code are actually forwarded to Twonky investigation, and the answer is sent back to Qnap (to send to the customer).

Bri

PS Twonky support should have answered that a little better by explaining that his version is actually supported, but that it's supported by Qnap.