my new NAS (and so much more): Synology DS213+

DS213+ Products - Synology Inc. Network Attached Storage

The box makes itself known as diskstation.local resp. DiskStation on my LAN. (Reliability …)

Of course it deserves a "1 Gbit/s" on my FRITZ!Box.

The box's OS is BusyBox; here are a few more details:


DiskStation> uname -a
Linux DiskStation 2.6.32.12 #2668 SMP Tue Dec 11 13:01:16 CST 2012 ppc GNU/Linux synology_qoriq_213+


I enabled SSH access for my personal user account rather soon, but the SSH login was not instantly successful. I tried "ssh -v", and from there the login seriously looked, as if it was almost successful. My web research wasn't successful either. Rather desperately I enabled "telnet access"; I tried to log in, and this was the result:

login: can't run /sbin/nologin: No such file or directory

It was clear then, that the default shell in the /etc/passwd entry for my user account was in my way /sbin/nologin so far. I made /bin/ash the default shell and everything was fine. Of course, I disabled telnet access again thereafter. And of course, once I added "nologin" to my web query, I found a few articles describing the issue.

SCP works; "rsync over ssh" (with my personal user account) does not work yet:

$ rsync -va --rsh='ssh -l root' /etc/motd diskstation:tmp/ # works$ rsync -va /etc/motd diskstation:tmp/ # fails
sending incremental file list
ERROR: module is read only
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1034) [Receiver=3.0.8]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (9 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.8]

Fiddling with /etc/ssh/sshd_config – I really don't know, what to change in order to overcome this obstacle.

Perl is not part of its standard equipment, but Python apparently is,

Through their Download Center I found this FTP server link. You can find various software for their boxes on their. There are also Perl installation packages, but the ones I tried are not for the current firmware release of "my" box, and in a way I am not up for an upgrade to beta software for my NAS.

(For now I summarised here everything I have tried so far, so I will be able to procede from here.)

A few more links:

• http://forum.synology.com/wiki
• http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/What_kind_of_CPU_does_my_NAS_have
• http://www.synology-wiki.de/index.php/Welchen_Prozessortyp_besitzt_mein_System%3F (this article gives us an IPKG link for the DS213+)

There are suggestions on the wiki(s) to install ipkg (yet another packaging system, not officially supported by Synology), and to install another rsync through ipkg. I may consider this, but I am not yet sure. I am quite able to use rsync (over ssh) as user root, but I am not with my personal account. I have no clue, what rights it needs, to allow my personal account to work as smoothly as user root. (To Be Solved!)

To be continued …