Symbolic Links on Synology DS209+

Stefanovich — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:33:08 +0000

Synology’s Disk Station Manager (DSM) creates folders (e.g. volume1/music) for you when you activate e.g AudioStation or iTunes. Currently there is no possiblity to change this. But what if you want to use your own folder structure? The solution is to use Symbolic links. This article describes how you can do this.

Because I also have a NMT (HDX-1000) I created a Multimedia folder which I shared. Reason for this is that I only had to create one mapping via NFS and not for every folder (music / video / etc.).

Currently I have the following structure
Multimedia
Multimedia/Music
Multimedia/Video

1. Synology DSM

1. Login as Administrator.
2. Go to network services, Web services
3. Enable Audiostation and press OK. (DSM automatically creates a /volume1/music folder)

2. Putty

I assume that you have Putty installed, otherwise you can download it here.

1. Open Putty and login with username “root” and your administrator password.
2. Type cd /volume1 and press Enter
3. When you type dir and press Enter you will see a folder “music”.
4. Type rm -r /volume1/music and press Enter to remove the “music” folder.
5. Type ln -s /volume1/Multimedia/Music /volume1/music and press Enter to create a symbolic link. (Note: uppercase/lowercase)
6. Type dir and press enter and you will see a music folder with “-> /volume1/Multimedia/Music” behind it.

Symbolic link

3. Audio Station

Copy some MP3 files to the /volume1/Multimedia/Music folder. When you’re done login to audio station and go to the library. Now you don’t see any files yet. This is because the files are not indexed yet.

4. Synology DSM

1. Go to network services, iTunes.
2. Press re-index (will take some time)
3. When finished go to the Audio station again and you’ll see your files.

Note: You don’t need to have iTunes activated. iTunes uses also the /volume1/music folder, so this will do.

5. File Station

When you click on the music folder in File Station I get a message “System is busy”. I think File Station can’t handle symbolic links but I am not sure.

6. Revert

1. Remove the Symbolic link by typing rm /volume1/music and press Enter. This doesn’t remove the /volume1/Multimedia/Music folder!
2. Typ mkdir /volume1/music and press Enter to create a music folder.

7. Problems

When you can’t connect with Putty, make sure you have enabled SSH service. (Network services, Terminal)

Tip

Tip: Create also .m3u playlist files for your albums. Those will picked up automatically.

Synology Firmware: DSM 2.0-0731

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