Hello all, I am a first-time poster but have been reading the boards extensively lately. I’ve had a 3 TB MyBookLive for just over a year and like many others have watched it basically run that entire time without sleeping. I finally started to get concerned recently and have done a ton of research and attempted numerous fixes to get that blue light to stay on. I’ve had some pretty decent success and now wanted to ask more knowledgeable posters for their opinions. I am very much a beginner, so forgive me if I use really simple language to describe what I’ve done. I’d never used the Mac terminal or SSH or anything like that until a few days ago.
First – I use my MBL as a NAS drive for my Sonos music system and I back up my laptop via Time Machine to the drive. I don’t need it for anything else, so I’ve disabled FTP, remote access, DLNA and iTunes.
Then I started reading about media/miocrawler so I enabled SSH and ran the command
chmod 644 mediacrawler
to disable that ■■■■■■. I also saw someone suggest
chmod -x mediacrawlerd
so I ran that too. (Is that redundant? Did one command cancel out the other? I have no idea.)
Then I read that you could supposedly kill ALL of the orion services which, if I understand correctly, includes both media and miocrawler. So I ran
/etc/init.d/orion stop
I also saw another trick to stop miocrawler. Again, I don’t have any idea if I’m canceling myself out with these commands. In my mind I was killing it and then just killing it again, right? So this was my next step:
vi /usr/miocrawler/miocrawlerd
This should open a file where the first line should read
#!/bin/sh
Put your curser in the second line using arrow keys. Press ‘i’. Type the following text in the second line
exit 1
The first two lines should now read:
#!/bin/sh
exit 1
And then, finally, I ran all of these:
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server stop
/etc/init.d/nfs-common stop
/etc/init.d/netatalk stop
/etc/init.d/portmap stop
/etc/init.d/upnp_nas stop
/etc/init.d/mDNSResponder stop
/etc/init.d/smb-daemon stop
/etc/init.d/orion stop
to supposedly disable ALL the stuff we don’t need on MBL.
Last but not least, I went in via system preferences on my laptop and set spotlight to no longer index the folders on my MBL.
I’m summarizing here and definitely did not run all of these commands at once; I continued to research and attempt fixes based on what I read over several days. Some of these commands I may have run more than once, I can’t really remember. In the midst of these various fixes I also rebooted about 800 times, ran numerous diagnostic tests (all passed) and reindexed my laptop HD, which sped up my backups significantly.
So, the result is that the MBL is working MUCH better. The green light only flashes when the drive is in use (it used to flash and you could hear the drive crunching data all the time). The blue light is on a lot, although I still hear the drive rev up and go from blue to solid green for what appears to be no reason. I’m so paranoid now that I tip-toe around the thing like a sleeping baby hoping not to wake it up when I see that precious blue light come on. Sometimes it stays blue for 10 minutes, sometimes 20 or more and sometimes it seems to sleep for 30 seconds and then turn green again. No clue why. But the light is solid no matter what, unless it’s in use. That’s good, right?
Here are my questions, and many thanks in advance to anyone who has read all this.
Did I do too much? Did I kill anything I didn’t mean to kill? (I don’t think I did – the Sonos plays fine and my backups are fine, that’s all I really care about.)
Is there anything else I should do, or should I be satisfied that this friggin light is now blue for a good chunk of the day? It would seem to me that it should be blue all the time unless I’m using the drive (right??), but maybe that’s too much to ask? Some blue is better than none?
And finally, if I reboot MBL again or repair permissions on my laptop does that erase any/all of the fixes I’ve made, or are they “permanent”?
Again, many many thanks if anyone has any thoughts or further advice.
