Fair play WDTony. I ain’t shooting over the bow. On a customer service and human phychology viewpoint, there is a mobile phone network I’m on called Giffgaff. What’s good with that company is that they’ve gone one step further then Western Digital when it comes to customer support.
They are very transparent when it comes to faults and service issues. All that’s needed for me is to go to the blog on the web and the staff at this phone company actually explain the reasons for failures and what’s being gone to rectify the problems.
In all fairness on here there is not a lot of feedback coming out of WD’s stable and it’s left to the users of this W.D. community to try identify the problems of which it’s good that some of the discussions make it to the W.D. firmware development team, but the feedback is missing! Like if there is some issue that’s been found, why does someone responsible for firmware builds NOT get directly in contact with the discoverer of the fault to find out exactly what they know.
For example, the issue of /etc/hosts getting corrupted. W.D. might now know why this is happening, I don’t know why it’s happening but someone on here may have an educated or idle idea that might just explain the reason.
For example, and Idle idea from me now. Maybe there is some service operating on the MyBook Live that is leaking memory or maybe there is some sort of stack overflow happening, or a buffer overflow condition that’s interfering with some part of the operating system that’s causing the wrong data being written to the file or even worse the wrong data being to the file system resulting in cross-linked files! In that case correcting one file of the cross-linked file instantly corrupts a file that was not corrupted.
It would also be good that IF there is a reason for missing out the NAS’s device name out of /etc/hosts then somewhere there is an explanation what the reason for this is.
People who are a lot more informed about why things are as they are will panic a lot less more. There are people putting their treasured memories on the MyBook Live and as good as SafePoint is, there will be people who have minimal knowledge.
W.D. also needs to listen to it’s customers a lot more.
For example, implement a selective backup! Allow shares, folders and sub-folders to be excluded from a SafePoint back-up. I know this can be done because I’ve done it so I have one 500Gb NAS that I can use to back-up a 1Tb NAS (the MyBook Live) which has more than 500Gb of data stored on it.
Get the thing to co-operate with on-line storage services like DropBox so user-selected shares and/or folders can synchronise with a DropBox storage area. I know it was mentioned. What would solve someone’s concerns of losing a small sub-set of files and folders if the drive suddenly fails due to old age,
The reason I wrote my comment about why /etc/hosts is not being updated and trying to find why is because no-one at W.D. is coming forward with an reason so it’s inevitable that people will begin to try find out why.
Maybe the reason someone decided not to update this file during the upgrade process is an attempt to prevent the hosts file getting corrupted and losing access to the WebUI?
I’ll give one suggestion right now that needs to be implemented into the MyBook Live.
Suggestion** :** When the MyBook Live starts up SSH access is enabled for 10 minutes as early on in the boot process as possible. If it is not accessed within 10 minutes it auto-disabled. If it is accessed within 10 minutes then it is set to remain enabled. It will be the owner’s choice to disable SSH from the Dashboard UI.
Why do this? In case the Dashboard UI fails and SSH had not been enabled. There will be a route to the back-end to that can be used to try fix the problems.
I’ve already once encountered the dead Dashboard UI after reboot. if SSH had been disabled then I would have been forced to RMA the NAS but I had remembered to enable SSH so recovery of my NAS ended up being a very sweet and simple procedure.
Yet another example, you’ll remember this, when Twonky kept failing all W.D. tech support could suggest was to do a full factory restore. I looked at it and the solution was to stop the Twonky service, erase two files and re-start Twonky. A solution that just took less than 5 minutes to implement and no need to wipe anything.
Seriously, the community here needs transparency, active feedback and reassurance.
I have seen that people have noted that there are updated versions of certain services that are stated to fix problems. Like the Samba service has been updated several times and maybe even VSFTPD. (I’m not including Twonky! Twonky is Wonky!)
Updates of these free-to-distribute services need to be reviewed and if they are not suitable for the MyBook Live, what are the reasons?
I guess that’s what people are asking for on this here forum. 
