Logging in to the Synology DiskStation as root

Note: I recently purchased a Synology DiskStation DS411j & I’m putting up posts about things I figure out. This is part of that series.

First order of business: logging in to the DS411j as root. Logging in is easy—you just enable the SSH service—but if you want to become root once you’re logged in, you can’t. You can’t sudo or use su. So instead, you have to SSH¹ in as root. But how? This was far harder to figure out than it should have been, but once you know how, it’s ridiculously easy & obvious.

Instead of logging in this way:

ssh admin@IP

Do this:

ssh root@IP

Same password in both cases.