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Disable HTTP Range Requests on Synology WebStation, Apache or Nginx

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I use my Synology NAS to host a variety of services including a web server, file server and a backup system. As part of some testing that I had been performing with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I needed to ensure that my web server does not respond to HTTP Range Requests, which allow clients to retrieve specific byte ranges rather than downloading an entire resource in a single transfer.

We can check whether a web server supports HTTP Range Requests by specifying a range of bytes as demonstrated in this cURL example below:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-10" -I http://depot.vcf.lab/PROD/vsan/hcl/lastupdatedtime.json -u $CREDS


You should receive an HTTP 206 response which indicates HTTP Range Requests is supported by your web server, which my Synology supports by default.

Unlike a traditional web server where disabling HTTP Range Requests is pretty straightforward, modifying the default behavior for Synology WebStation is slightly more complicated. After some trial and error, I was able to successfully disable HTTP Range Requests on my Synology system, and for those with a similar requirement, the following sections outline the steps for several popular web server backends.

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Quick Tip - Establish trust between VCF 9.0 & 9.1 Installer and VCF Offline Depot w/self-sign TLS certificate

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For lab purposes, when configuring a VCF 9.0 or 9.1 Offline Depot, you can streamline the infrastructure setup by configuring the VCF Installer to use HTTP instead of HTTPS, which is the default configuration from the VCF Installer.

Alternatively, if you decide to use the system default which will expect the VCF Offline Depot to be served over HTTPS, you might be using a self-signed TLS certificate. If you attempt to connect to your offline depot with the VCF Installer, you probably will hit the following error as the TLS certificate is not trusted by the VCF Installer, which is expected.


In VCF 5.x, the workaround was to import your TLS certificate chain into SDDC Manager's certificate store which would then allow the trust to be established.

The exact same solution is required for the VCF Installer, but the path to the certificate store has changed.

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Single Node VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF 9.0 & VCF 9.1

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 continues to support one of the most popular and powerful load balancer, VMware Avi Load Balancer. When you deploy a new VMware Avi Load Balancer within a given VCF Domain, by default SDDC Manager will deploy three VMware Avi Controllers for high availability purposes.

For lab purposes, you may not need all three VMware Avi Controllers but there was no way to change the system default in earlier releases of VCF. With VCF 9.0, we now have way to deploy just a single VMware Avi Controller, which is fantastic for lab and testing purposes.

UPDATE (05/27/26) - This workaround is still applicable for VCF 9.1.0, there is variable called $vcf91 which is set to $true which will add an additional property that is required with VCF 9.1 and later deployments.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, use only within a lab environment.

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