Hacking my Western Digital Mybook World Edition
My recent project to take up all my time is my Western Digital Mybook World Edition 500GB NAS. It can be modified to do all kinds of cool thangs.So I picked up this guy on the cheap clearance at my work (for about $50 cheaper than what could be found online!) and so far I’ve been having fun adding to its list of capabilities. Out of the box I had it hooked up and mapped to all the computers in the house which is nice in its self. Still trying to figure out why the on board Gigabit Ethernet port isn’t very fast. Even though my router isn’t Gigabit capable, it’s connected at 100mb/s and it’s wicked slow. Running about 3-4mb/s takes a while, especially trying to send full DVD size files to it.
The box it’s self is basically a small computer, running an ARM processor and a version of Debian linux. I’ve mainly been using this site for setting up an ftp server on it that’s not quite working yet. You can gain access to the linux root by two exploits. The most popular is the ssh access, the second is the Telnet. I couldn’t get the ssh exploit to work, but was successful with Telnet. Once you can gain root access via the methods, you proceed to download and install the software package installer repositories (aka feeds) Optware.
You can install apps manually, but I don’t see why you would want too because this way is so much easier and saves a lot of time because the team has built some solid repositories. Most of the people on the wikidot site recommend it anyway. It helps to have linux/unix shell to talk to the drive. I’ve been using my mac’s terminal to connect to it with telnet.
I can’t wait to get that going so I can have access to my files where ever I go and finally get some real world use out of my expensive FiOS upload connection. More than likely i will ditch the Western Digital case and put the hard drive into a faster NAS enclosure with all the things I want the mybook to do built in. Something like this NAS enclosure or I might just shell out the money for the Myka.
Other plans I have for it are a UPnP MediaServer, Torrent client, print server, and http webserver to stream mp3’s and porn to my iPhone.
Check back for updates and maybe a tutorial.
UPDATE: Transmission, a torrent client, is now an Optware package witch makes it very convenient and simple to install. Tutorial here. Transmission also has a web-based remote client build in so you can start/stop your torrents from where ever you are (like at work when your supposed to be working). This lifehacker article is for setting up clutch (witch is now built in with transmission) for remote access to your computer, but the concept is the same and can be applied to your new Transmission optware package the Mybook.
