brewmaster I know it's a lot to ask but I'm getting a little frustrated.
It's not at all a lot to ask. That's what the forum is for!
I use a DS415 from Synology, and for Linux clients, I use NFS (Network File System). The NAS runs on a small Linux system, so it didn't make sense to me to use anything except NFS for Linux clients. I'm assuming that you can properly configure the NAS for NFS, or if not, can use the excellent help from Synology to get that done.
On the client side, there are a few things you need to do, and as Linux provides several ways to do almost everything, here's how I do it:
First, provide a place to mount your shares. I use the /mnt folder, which I've always believed was meant for this purpose. For example, I use /mnt/Downloads, /mnt/Documents, /mnt/Backups, and so on.
Next, make sure you've downloaded NFS support from the repository. Software Center is a good bet for this, because you can simply search for NFS. Some distributions differ, but on Solus you want to get nfs-utils. Otherwise, when you try to mount your shares, you'll get a collection of errors, because your system won't know how to deal with that file system.
Then you'll need to modify your /etc/fstab file (file system table) to tell Solus about those shares. After its original contents, insert lines like this to tell the system exactly how to mount the shares:
DiskStation415:/volume1/Pictures /mnt/Pictures nfs defaults 0 0
DiskStation415:/volume1/Music /mnt/Music nfs defaults 0 0
DiskStation415:/volume1/Keys /mnt/Keys nfs defaults 0 0
DiskStation415:/volume1/ISOs /mnt/ISOs nfs defaults 0 0
The man page for fstab will tell you all you ever wanted to know about it, but basically you tell each entry where the share is located, where you want it to go on your system, what file system it is, and some options. Unless you have special reasons not to use the defaults (again, see the man page), these will probably work for you.
Finally, in a terminal, issue the command sudo mount -a. If there are no errors (e.g., typos in /etc/fstab), you should now be able to access those shares in the file manager.
One more thing that's somewhat related to this: look in your file manager (e.g., Nautilus) for a menu entry to "bookmark" the share that you're viewing. It will add a link that will take you directly to the share, without needing to work your way from /mnt to the share itself.
Finally, it's possible to create your /etc/fstab file such that you won't need to mount the shares manually each time you boot the system. There were problems with that when it was first done, so we've been manually mounting those shares for a while now. Hopefully that will change soon, and you'll need to change your "options" section a bit. Not something to worry about for now, though.
