Synology

DISCLAIMER

Any information provided here is provided as is.

There are no guarantees that it will work for you and I will not be held responsible for any damage or data loss.

Using anything from here is at your own risk.

So if you still wish to continue here is what (I think) you need to know to set up an rclone mount on a Synology NAS

If you need help you can find me on the plex forum or rclone forum @blim5001

Before you start, you will need know a little bit as information here WILL require using the command line, so you should be familiar with connecting to your NAS via SSH.
If that is not something you feel comfortable with, then I suggest you do not carry on.

In order to mount remote filesystems you will need the FUSE Libraries. These are not available in the Synology OS by default, so you need enable synocommunity package repository in the DSM Package manager to allow you install an additional package which will provide these libraries. For more info on that, see: https://synocommunity.com/ The package you need to install from the synocommunity repository is SSHFS

UPDATE (2020):

It seems there are now some new packages available in the syno community repo that seem to be available for more architectures. There are a few packages under the SynoCli grouping. I think the only one you should need is SynoCli Disk Tools .

I am going to give it a try and see if it works. (Hope it does as SSHFS is no longer available). Unmounted my drive, removed the SSHFS package and installed SynoCli Disk Tools and remounted. All seems good so far.

You should not really use the root user for this. It should all work as your main NAS Admin account (at least it does in my setup)

On my NAS I have homes setup (this means your home directory should be accessible from the other machines on the network) and so for this guide we will say I have:

  • A user account: admin
  • A folder on my nas at this location /volume1/homes/admin
  • I connect to the NAS via ssh using this admin account
  • An rclone config to my Google Drive, which in this case is gDrive:

[Note: You do not need to have ‘homes’ enabled, but if not then I would create a folder on your raid volume to store the programs and scripts]

If you are on a Mac then you can use the Terminal program from your Utilites folder.
For Windows users (Which I am not) I guess it’s Putty for you guys and girls

I am not a fan of the default Shell that is set when you login via SSH.

So the first command to run after connecting via SSH is this:

exec /bin/bash

That will put you into a bash shell (Which may prevent issues where you need to escape command line flags, you will see what I mean by these as we go on.)

So you should now have installed the SSHFS package and be connected to your NAS via SSH

Now let’s install rclone with the following command:

curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

You will probably need to enter your password to complete the install

At which point it will install rclone to the /usr/bin directory
Don’t worry about the:
bash: line 153: mandb: command not found warning
You can safely ignore this.

To check it is installed there run this command:

/usr/bin/rclone -V

If it is installed at that location, you should see something like:

rclone v1.43
- os/arch: linux/amd64
- go version: go1.11

Then try just

rclone -V

If that gives the same result, then fine, your system knows where rclone is, if not, then exit from your SSH session and re login (I have found that sometimes the path does not get updated until you logout and log back in)

Now you need to configure rclone to connect to your google drive.
There are detailed instructions here https://rclone.org/drive/, so really don’t think I need to repeat all that here.

Once you have done that you should have a working rclone connection to your google drive. Test this with

rclone lsd gDrive:

Replace gDrive with whatever you called your remote when you did your rclone config.

This should list all the Directories in the top level of your google drive.

All we need to do now is create a mount point on yours NAS on which to mount your google drive

For this example I am going to mount it to a folder in my home directory.

Create a folder, I would do this through SSH to prevent the DSM adding the annoying 

@eaDir

Directory

mkdir /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

Next mount the drive

/usr/bin/rclone mount -v gDrive: /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive --allow-other --dir-cache-time 672h --vfs-cache-max-age 675h --vfs-read-chunk-size 64M --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 1G --buffer-size 32M &

This should mount the drive and put the mount process into the background.

If you did not get any errors then run:

ls /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

This should list the files and folders in the top level of your google drive

If you get an error “Command mount needs 2 arguments maximum” when you run the mount command, you will need to make sure the drive is not mounted before continuing.
(This is what I meant earlier about escaping command line flags, not sure why you need to this as I do not need to… but anyways)

So run this command to unmount the drive:

fusermount -uz /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

and again if this throws an error, then use this instead 

fusermount \-uz /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

After running the fusermount command, run this command to see/check if your drive is mounted:

ls /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

If it is empty then your drive is not mounted and you can now try a slightly different mount command:
(We have had to escape all the command line flags by putting a backslash in front of them.)

/usr/bin/rclone mount \-v gDrive: /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive \--allow-other \--dir-cache-time 672h \--vfs-cache-max-age 675h \--vfs-read-chunk-size 64M \--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 1G \--buffer-size 32M &

If there are no errors this time, then run:

ls /volume1/homes/admin/googledrive

You should see a list of all the files in your Google Drive.

If yes, then success, it’s working. Your google drive is mounted on your NAS

You can now go and create your libraries in Plex and point them to this mount point.

Next we will come onto Mounting when you reboot the nas and periodically checking the mounts and remounting if necessary

tbc…