Several guides published on this site require terminal access to your synology.

This guide will help you configure it correctly, to be able to succesfully complete other tutorials like setting up a GitLab environment.

Terminal access is achieved by SSH. Configuring your Synology for terminal login is pretty straightforward. However we are going to make a change to the default setup.

  1. Login into DSM with your administrator account
  2. Open the Control Panel
  3. Go to Terminal & SNMP
  4. Set Port: 32
  5. Open Advanced Settings
  6. Set the security level to High
  7. Click Apply on the Advanced Settings window
  8. Click Apply on the Control Panel window

This will enable the SSH service and start it on port 32, we are setting to the port to 32 because we need port 22 to be available for use by GitLab for cloning over SSH.

Also setting the port to 32 will add a very basic security layer to your Synology, because if you are going to expose the SSH service to the internet we don't want script kiddies to get access to the host SSH service on port 22.

When port 22 is going to be scanned in the future because you have exposed it for GitLab if for some reason someone gets access to it (highly improbable because its SSH) then they will end up inside the GitLab container and not on your host.

In order to access your Synology over SSH you require a SSH client.

  • Linux
    • Any distro
  • Mac OSX
    • Built-in client available
  • Windows

When using Linux or Mac OS you can simply start a terminal and use the following command to gain access.

ssh username@ip -p 32

Replace username with an adminstrator username on your Synology and replace ip with either the ip x.x.x.x or hostname / dns name of your Synology.

Only Synology administrator accounts will be able to login

Hope this helps you gain terminal access to your Synology.