MyBook Live, many buyer's complains, but a GREAT product.

The research

Since the flooding, hard drive prices went up. There is a lot of choices and options for whoever wants to get a few more Bytes at their hands.
My first objective was first to have a copy of all my important files (work, pictures, videos) that I absolutely not want to loose. So what are my options:
- Add other internal hard drives, copy files once in a wile or automate it using some softwares or homemade scripts. Create a RAID drive? Ok why not...
- Get an USB external drive and copy files ones in a while, or use software, scritps..
- NAS what is that?

NAS, network attached storage. Only three words to define a pretty complex appliance. In fact these NAS Drives are made of : one or more hard drives, a little board that we could call "computer" able to manage the hard drives and provide Ethernet connection. NAS is a way to share a hard drive on the local network easily.

Alright, I think I'm either convinced or curious to see what is that. Beeing a professional software and website developer, a curious linux user, I thought that I had a pretty good idea of what a NAS exactly is what what potentially I could turn it into.

My choice went for the Western Digital MyBook Live. Why:
- It's one of the cheapest solution per GB
- The web-interface to manage the NAS looks pretty neat
- They allow the usage of SSH and a debian system is installed on the onboad computer.

This is great it's like a very small computer, that uses no power, that can be accessed thought the network, and share files. All I need :)

Reception of the order

So this is what I got out of the box: One Ethernet cable, one power adapter and THE hard drive. Needless to say that I wont look at the manual before everything is plugged... Anyways there was no manual in my WD cardboard box... The LEDs are blinking, seems to work.

When I go back to my regular desktop computer I try to find it's IP address. These devices get an IP from the router as they are looking for a DHCP server. So I log in the router administration webpage, check the DHCP allocation table and found my IP 192.168.1.19

The Deception

Once I have that I open my browser and simply enter http://192.168.1.19 to see what interface WD offers to it's customers. Well it looks nice, updates automatically, but is very buggy. Besides the fact that I disabled DHCP and use a manual configuration for connecting to the network, I'm unable to create any share, users... unable to use it as we should... That's sad and expected as many reviews are reporting, but...

Holly Grail

By searching a little bit on the web you can find that this is due to the update. They messed up something in the update process, and once you update your firmware, the system is messed up. The solution is on this post

You need to completely "flush" what serves as a firmware for that appliance and put a fresh one. I used the script available from that website but proceed a little bit differently: My "Public" share was not even visible, so I transferred the files using sftp. After it restarts, it was all magic, the web-interface worked smoothly and allowed my to configure my book :)

Time to SSH

Alright let's open the console and do a little ssh root@192.168.1.5, enter the default password "welc0me" and here we are:

 ssh root@192.168.1.5  
 root@192.168.1.5's password:  
 Linux MyBookLive 2.6.32.11-svn70860 #1 Thu May 17 13:32:51 PDT 2012 ppc  
 Disclaimer: SSH provides access to the network device and all its  
 content, only users with advanced computer networking and Linux experience  
 should enable it. Failure to understand the Linux command line interface  
 can result in rendering your network device inoperable, as well as allowing  
 unauthorized users access to your network. If you enable SSH, do not share  
 the root password with anyone you do not want to have direct access to all  
 the content on your network device.  

Installing Tor and Transmission

Now what we could turn this little machine on: A 24/7 computer to download stuff for us. This way my main computer or my laptop do not need to stay on, bother me or overheat during the night.

I use Tor for the connection to the trackers, not for the connection to the other peers. This way I can annonymize a little bit more what I'm doing on the Torrent World.

Transmission is a neat software to exchange torrent, it's very efficient, and provides a web interface.

A few commands needs to be entered in the terminal:

 apt-get update  
 apt-get install tor     
 apt-get install transmission-daemon  

Configuring Transmission

First I open the transmission-daemon configuration file:

 pico /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json  

I seetted up as this:

 "rpc-authentication-required": true,  
 "rpc-bind-address": "0.0.0.0",  
 "rpc-enabled": true,  
 "rpc-password": "MYPASSWORD",  
 "rpc-port": 9091,  
 "rpc-username": "transmission",  
 "rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1",  
 "rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,  

This will provide a web-interface requiring a connection, the username is "transmission" the password is "transmission" by default, but you should change that.

I also created a "Download" folder in the public shared folder:

 cd /DataVolume/shares/Public  
 mkdir Downloads  
 chmod 775 Downloads/  
 chown nobody Downloads/  

And configured it in the transmission-daemon configuration file: 

 "download-dir": "/DataVolume/shares/Public/Downloads",

For using the TOR network to connect to the  trackers:

 "proxy": "127.0.0.1",
 "proxy-auth-enabled": false,
 "proxy-auth-password": "",
 "proxy-auth-username": "",
 "proxy-enabled": true,
 "proxy-port": 9050,
 "proxy-type": 2,

We save the configuration file and send the signup signal to transmission-daemon to reload the configuration. 

 killall -HUP transmission-daemon

We now need to add a block-list. The block-list contains a lot of malicious IP ranges that are know to belong to institutions monitoring torrent traffic. They are seeding you files and if you download it completely, they will sue you for copyright infringements.

The default version of transmission-daemon that is downloaded from the Debian packages is now version 2.03. It does not support user entered URL for the block list, so you have to manually download and decompress the list. Description of the issue can be found on this tread

 /etc/init.d transmission-daemon stop
 cd /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/blocklists
 wget http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level1&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz
 gunzip bt_level1.gz
 /etc/init.d transmission-daemon start

Now transmission will restart, compile the block-list in a bin format and use it. Type ls in the console to see if you have the .bin file along with the block-list you just decompressed.

VOILA ! 

This picture shows Transmission's web interface, an ISO of Debian that is being downloaded, and the shared drive that contains the ISO that is being downloaded.

Of course this can be done from any computer of my network as I was pretty relaxed on safety measures here. And with a few ports forwarding from my router, I can manage my downloads from anywhere as long as I have internet :) (I have a DynDns account to get a static URL on the web to my router)

And the load on that poor CPU that is inside MyBook ? I'm downloading files thought samba (because I copy all the movies to MyBook, and download a Debian ISO at the same time)

Top shows me that MyBook is not really under pressure and is doing pretty well.

Conclusion

With the MyBook live from WD, you get a lot for you bucks ! I would recommend it !

However the fact that the default firmware is not working properly would be pretty annoying for a someone without any experience in networking or linux console.