[Discuss] Fun with Synology (was WD My Cloud PR4100)

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

I did the final switch from the old HP to the new Synology this
afternoon and I figured I'd mention some of the gotchas in case any of
you are interested in doing something similar.

debootstrap is a great tool but it produces minimal installations. Be
prepared to install pretty much everything with apt.

It's a chroot so you need to bind mount /dev, /dev/pts, /proc and /sys.

It's a chroot so you don't get an init system. Any services you want
running in the chroot environment need to be started manually. Given
that the bind mounts are needed you might as well script the mounts and
the startups together

Also, systemd really, really hates chrooted environments. :) There are
workarounds but probably the easiest is just to switch to sysvinit's
scripts.

Btrfs snapshots are a little weird. Debian 9's tools complain about
invalid ioctl when trying to create snapshots (but they rename and
delete just fine). The version Synology ships work just fine. Weird.

Otherwise everything moved over just fine.

A convenience of doing this: Synology don't ship development tools so
the chroot environment lets you compile kernel modules from Synology's
tree right on the box.

But yeah, everything else works about the same as it would on a native
Debian installation.

-- 
Rich P.