This Page describes steps to make safe experiments with your NAS. As long as you don’t mess with /dev/mtd0 you probably won’t be able to screw your box

You have to create a partition on the harddisk, or usb-stick with an ext2 filesystem and create a symbolic link to the root folder (/).

ln -s / /mnt/usb/slash

You can now browse the initrd over a smb mount through the created symlink.

You can also modify the files in the initrd. Some files, like /bin/busybox cannot be overwritten from the SMB-share. The new file has to be saved under a different name, or in a different folder. To overwrite the old file cp -f, or mv -f on the NAS have to be used. See the next section how to execute them.

You can edit /bin/hotplug.sh and enter any commands you want to execute. You can redirect the output to logfiles, so you can read them for troubleshooting. After you plug in or out any usb device the script will get called.

• All changes to the initrd are gone after a poweroff.
• Some kernels have no pty support, so it is not possible to start any remote shells, which rely on pty pseudo terminal support.

If you know any remote shell which doesn’t need pty support, please update this article!