Running OpenClaw on a Synology NAS
15 hours ago
Containers, certificates, and uid 1000 — everything DSM’s docs don’t tell you
I thought it would make sense to run a “second brain” agent on my Synology NAS. The NAS obviously can’t run an LLM locally — the hardware just isn’t built for inference — but it’s fully capable of running OpenClaw wired up to a cloud model (OpenAI, Anthropic, or anything else it supports).
I hit a steep learning curve, discovering Docker containers and OpenClaw more or less at the same time. Here’s what I learned, written up so the next person (probably future me, on a fresh install) doesn’t have to rediscover it the hard way.
Pulling the image
Synology has shipped Container Manager since DSM 7.2 (it used to be called Docker before Synology renamed and reskinned it). It lets you pull and manage OCI/Docker images through a GUI.
The right way to get OpenClaw is straight from its official registry, GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io).
Unfortunately, Container Manager’s registry search doesn’t support GHCR. GHCR authenticates anonymous pulls with an OAuth2 bearer-token exchange against ghcr.io/token before handing over the manifest, and Container Manager’s registry client doesn’t implement that flow — it only speaks to registries that behave like Docker Hub. The practical…
