One of the main lessons that I have learned in the last three years in my job as a programmer is that if you only have to do a job once or twice, use brute force.

Today, I was setting up a Synology NAS. The instructions for getting started are extremely sparse, consisting mainly of “type in the IP address in a web browser and follow the instructions there.”

In the old days, I would have started typing IP addresses until I found one that worked. Today, I made a new directory called “ips” and ran

for i in $(seq 50); do
  echo "curl 10.0.1.$i > $i"
done | parallel -j 25

Then, since I am (obviously) impatient, I ran wc -l * every few seconds to see which files were not empty. I found it at 10.0.1.5.

Later I discovered find.synology.com, which is the official way to find your Synology.