Using SSH and FTP on Western Digital MyBook World

I recently bought a Western Digital MyBook World, a tiny NAS hard drive. It’s running Linux and I’ve discovered you can enable SSH access via a hack on the excellent Martin Hinner’s website.

Please note that this operation is actually a hack and void warranty! If you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s a risk you brick your MyBook.

After downloading his hack, you will be able to connect your MyBook World via SSH. The first thing to do is, as he says on his website, to make sshd permanent. To do so, log in as root add the following in the file /etc/inittab:

::sysinit:/usr/sbin/sshd

Removing Mionet Software

Martin also mention you should remove the factory processes, like the Mionet software, which is in my humble opinion, useless. This will save a lil’ bit memory. You can do it logged in as root and:

# su
# cd /etc/init.d
# mv mionet.sh mionet.sh.bak
# reboot

Now you should have a clean linux box with a very few processes.

Adding vsftpd in 3 steps

Now we can install a ftp server. Martin has made precompiled packages, so we will use them. Type, still logged in as root:

# wget ftp://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/mhi/mybook/vsftpd.tar.gz -q -O - | tar xzvf - -C /

This command downloads and installs vsftpd at the appropriate place. Now we need to configure the server.Use vi and open /etc/vsftpd.conf.

That’s it. You now have a FTP server on your network drive. As it runs linux and you can access it via SSH, possibilities are huge. I’m now trying to install a bit torrent client with a web interface, like Torrent Flux.

August 27th, 2007 / Trackback