The problem 🔗

I run a bunch of stuff on my QNAP NAS to avoid having to purchase an actual server, most of them are containerized self-hosted alternative solutions to popular cloud products, like Immich, Paperless NGX, Glance, and a bunch of others, all behind a convenient reverse proxy.

With great power, however, comes great responsibility. And figuring out a reliable 3-2-1 backup strategy often means I have to SSH into my machines to work on configuration files, cronjobs, etc…

Allowing your QNAP NAS to accept incoming SSH connections is easy enough, simply enable the feature in your Web UI settings, specify a port, and boom. I did, however, encounter a slight problem.

Right after connecting to the machine did I realize that there was zero feedback on keyboard input. This is usually caused by a misconfigured stty or a missing $TERM file. A quick which stty shed some (sad) light on this: which: no stty in .... I’m not entirely sure why QNAP has settled on omitting this core tool from their images (if you do, please let me know. I’m genuinely interested), but I do know that getting it to run was much more troublesome than I had expected.

The path to enlightenment 🔗

To begin with, there is no way to install small core packages like core-utils using the web UI. There’s also no clear indicating which package manager to use instead. Some internet findings report qpkg (which was not present on my machine). I did however encounter qpkg_cli, which did allow me to install the same packages that the web UI had access to, so it’s clearly their under-the-hood backend for this.

Luckily, there is a community of QNAP enthusiasts which provide open source packages for QNAP machines: Entware-NG. Documentation around it is scarce, but following some discussions on Reddit, I was able to compile it down to this simple list:

  • Add https://www.myqnap.org/repo.xml to your QNAP App Center repositories
  • Update your package lists
  • Install the Entware-std package via the App Center

This will give you access to a large pool of open source packages, as well as the opkg cli tool to install them from the terminal. You may install the core-utils like this:

sudo opkg update
sudo opkg install core-utils

Unfortunately, it appears that stty is not included in the core-utils package. There is also no utils-linux packages present.

The (hacky) solution 🔗

Alas, not all is lost, since opkg does provide us with a busybox:

sudo opkg install busybox

# Create a symlink that makes the applet callable as “stty”
sudo ln -sf /opt/bin/busybox /opt/bin/stty

# Add /opt/bin to PATH if it isn’t already
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/bin
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/opt/bin' >> ~/.profile   # persist for future sessions

# Test
stty -a

After making these changes and reconnecting to my machine, I was finally able to actually see what kind of abominable mistypings I continuously sent over the wire. Time for some typing practice I presume …