Edit: Found the problem. The drive isn’t sending the external ip address in it’s requests to wd2go.com as such the requests are invalid. No automated fix, but there is a manual workaround. Basically it’s a bug in an executable. See last post for details.
I set up my My Book Live about 5 weeks ago. At the time I set up port forwarding on my router and set up manual ports on the drive and got a “connected” status telling me port forwarding was working. That worked fine until last night when I ended up disconnectnig the network cable from the My Book Live. Since then I can’t get the WD2Go service into direct connection (port forwarding) mode, it always goes to relay mode. I didn’t change anything on my router. The only thing I did on the drive itself is enable SSH and change the root password.
I set up logging on my router and when I enable (or disable) remote access, the drive makes 4 or 5 connections to https://wd2go.com (198.107.148.110) and then simply connects to the relay server. There are no incoming connection attempts at all. I tested logging by connecting to the remote port I set up on my router and that shows up in my log (and I get a 403 Forbidden page in my browser), so logging is working.
The problem appears to be that the WD2Go service never even bothers to test to see if the ports I added are being forwarded. It just switched to relay mode.
A few other things I’ve seen:
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Sometimes the status temporarily changes to “failed”, even though the relay connection is still up.
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Sometimes the status temporarily changes to “connection” (not relay), even though I can see the relay connection being used. Sometimes it looks like it really does switch to port forwarding, but then simply opens another relay connection. Whatever it does, it switches back to relay pretty quickly (within a minute).
I don’t want to use relay mode since it’s slower and it’s “leaking bytes”. I tracked the relay connection while it was not in use (idle) for 10 minutes and there was a total of 114.6 KB going back and forth since the drive periodically contacts wd2go.com and sometimes switches relay ip addresses for some reason. That’s 687.6 KB per hour, 16.12 MB per day and about 483 MB per month when not even using the connection. That’s rediculous that the My Book Live is now using nearly 500 MB of data a month when idle when it used to use nothing. Especially since I have a capped service Internet service .
Direct mode worked fine for 50 days, how can I get the servers to switch back to direct mode? I’ve sent an email to WD, but don’t expect a useful response).