I needed to setup a persistent cron job on my QNAP TS-431 that would run a PHP script (actually the script that let’s me always know what the IP address of my home router is from anywhere in the world). However, the QNAP has the php executable buried and the directory is not in the $PATH environment variable. It’s not too hard to find though, if you need to run a PHP script just do this:

mnt/ext/opt/apache/bin/php /path/to/some-php-script.php

If you use rsync with the -rsh=ssh option it looks for a private key called id_rsa in the ~/.ssh folder. If (for whatever reason) you want to specify a different private key from the default then you can do it with:

-e ‘ssh -i /some/path/some_key’

This can be useful if want a key per host. Or, if like me, you idiotically created the keys with a different name than the default.

QNAP helpfully explains how to add items to crontab on one of the NAS machines on their wiki here. Less helpfully they don’t explain that adding jobs with crontab -e and then restarting the cron daemon won’t persist through a reboot. Yay. However, you get around this by adding jobs directly to /etc/config/crontab. Once you’ve done that reload the crontab file and restart the CRON daemon with:

crontab /etc/config/crontab && /etc/init.d/crond.sh restart

Thanks fellas.