Tech Singularity

Recently, I've had the pleasure of configuring a nice little NAS - Synology DS1513+. At home, I run its smaller, two bay brother - the DS209, which had served me well for the past few years, and I did not expect its bigger, badder brother to disappoint.

One of the primary motivators for acquiring the DS1513+ was the requirement for cloning and backing-up entire hard-drive images over the network. Having some experience with Clonezilla, I knew it to be a solid application, appropriate for this job. I've used Clonezilla in the past to perform partition and complete hard-drive image backups both locally, and over the network. The process was a breeze, and I did not expect much resistance from DS1513+, however, I did end up hitting a few snags along the way.

So here are some of the things to look out for if you happen to be dealing with this beast:

1. Make sure sshd is running.
   It can be enabled through the admin web ui, however, only root and admin users will be able to login. In order to enable ssh login for other users, edit /etc/passwd as the root user.
   
   E.g. change from:
   username:x:1030:100:UserName:/var/services/homes/username:/sbin/nologin
   
   to:
   username:x:1030:100:UserName:/var/services/homes/username:/bin/sh
   
   and restart sshd:
   /usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S95sshd.sh restart

2. Make sure SFTP is running.
   In order to save/restore an image to/from a remote location, Clonezilla will mount the remote directory with SSHFS (SSH Filesystem). SSHFS operates via SFTP and SSH, hence an ssh account with a home directory is needed on the NAS, and SFTP and SSH services have to be running. Both SSH and SFTP services can be enabled via the admin web ui.
   It is important to note that Synology's SFTP service will convert the absolute path of the user's home (e.g. /volume1/homes/your_home_dir) to /home. This is something I did not anticipate, and it had caused me some grief as the remote directory would fail to mount.