Dirk große Osterhues

A SoHo-NAS is a handy device that can store loads of data and acts a central home server all at once. Just recently I had the chance to play around with one of those toys in order to learn about their capabilities.

To be able to install some useful and common Linux commandline tools on a Synology NAS, it needs to get bootstraped. This article assumes that a remote shell SSH access is already established. The rest of the process is fairly simple.

First, change to a directory for temporary data:

cd /volume1/@tmp

Now, the relevant data is supposed to be retrieved - in this case for an Intel Atom-based NAS:

wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-i686/cross/unstable/syno-i686-bootstrap_1.2-7_i686.xsh

This file is a self extracting container that contains the relevant packages and at the same time creates the necessary file and directory structure. It gets executed like this:

ash syno-i686-bootstrap_1.2-7_i686.xsh && rm syno-i686-bootstrap_1.2-7_i686.xsh

To get the most recent package list and also the latest packages themselves, the following command has to be run:

ipkg update && ipkg upgrade

The install script modifies the current PATH variable so that ipkg can be found. However, to make the change permanent, the PATH variable in root's .profile needs to look like this:

PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/syno/sbin:/usr/syno/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin