When I was browsing the specs of NAS products I was pondering running a Subversion server on my prospective NAS. At my client I’ve helped set up the method for doing version control and of course I used Subversion as the tool.

Despite concise specification pages you’re never really sure what you are going to get, when you buy a product you don’t know anything about. I knew nothing about NAS products, so I did not know at all how it would turn out. A fresh untampered with unit is what I started out with and it clearly didn’t offer Subversion functionality. Soon I found out it was just a Linux box on slightly exotic hardware.

I installed the bootstrap for my particular NAS. For the DS408 based on a Freescale PowerPC based processor this means downloading the latest installer from http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-e500/cross/unstable/. At this moment that’s syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-5_powerpc.xsh. Just run that one as root. Add “src packages http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-e500/cross/unstable” to the file that holds the repositories as described here. Do ipkg update, ipkg upgrade and you’ve got the base system installed.

All you need to do now is install apache and svn with these commands “ipkg install svn” and “ipkg install apache” and you’ve installed Apache and Subversion on your DS408. This should work on the 508 too, if I’m right. Just check if they have the same processor.

Of course you’re still left to put the subversion libraries in Apache, so they’re loaded. Also you’ll have to set up the url handling for the repository. Both should be trivial for anybody who’s played around with Unix operating systems before. Just look for a directory called conf.d within the Apache folders. It’s got a basic setup. For more information or help you can contact me.

So, in the end I got what I wanted. I can set up any number of Subversion repositories on my NAS. Mine are stored on my RAID 6 volume. Quite lovely.