Looking for way to run my own webserver and beeing fond of the Synology range of diskstations the choice was easy.
An easy win for Synology because of the user friendly interface, backup possibilities and all the nice stuff that works almost out of the box…
-At that point I remembered the not quite optimal performance experiences I had running a webserver on the diskstations I own-.
Enthusiasm about my first and easy choice gone and back to the drawing board.
I did read some articles about running a responsive webserver on a diskstation by dedicating it to only serving webpages, but this would be a waste of my Synology.
As a longtime computer user and engineer i’ve piled up old hardware probably quite capable of running a responsive server.
I’m not afraid setting up a server myself, installing LAMP or NGINX on a Linux server is no wizardry with the help of internet.
But hardening, updating and maintaining would-be quite an effort so, for ease, I almost decided to use one of my Synologys.
Wile trying to make a final decision i stumbled on the XPEnology project wich gave my project a new direction.
Project goal as of now : get XPEnology running on a Dell Latitude E4310 laptop.
What is Xpenology?
Xpenology is a bootloader for Synology’s operating system which is called DSM (Disk Station Manager) and is what they use on their NAS devices.
DSM is running on a custom Linux version developed by Synology.
Its optimized for running on a NAS server with all of the features you often need in a NAS device.
Xpenology creates the possibility to run the Synology DSM on any x86 device like any pc or self-built NAS
Read more in the next part XPEnology Considerations and hardware.
