Installing software

Greetings, all. I'm a newcomer here, and I appreciate the forum to ask questions.

Here is the situation: I am installing software on a network hard-drive (NAS), to add functionality to it. The OS is in a read-only flash partition. Someone else hacked the firmware to install Busybox on this device. It has telnet, ftp, and some other services running. But, it is missing things like tar and ipkg. I am working on it by telnetting in from an OS X machine.

There is a directory (opt) which is a link to the writeable (hard drive) part of the device. It has a bin directory in it.

My question: how can I install software on this? Can I just copy the tar binary from my machine to this /opt/bin? I tried it, and when I try to run it it says "applet not found". So, how does one install software manually, without tar, and outside the usual space?

Thanks much.

Cheers,
Jeremy

applet not found means either you have not installed all you need, either you have now an ENV issue: PATH maybe?