I’ll post this on the ideas page, but would be interesting to see how many others think this is a good idea (thus getting WD to think its a good idea).
Background. I’ve been using “Public” folder on my My Duo Live to share all my Home videos, Movies, Photos, Music etc… I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with this, as anyone who can gain access to my home network, can effectively delete all the information with no passwords required. Basically anonymous users have full write access in that share and there is no way to change it. This could be a guest with their teenage children which stays at our house, and uses the wifi network (which is passworded) and browses around the place and gets up to mischievous. Or it could be family members who make a mistake etc… Or it could be a virus on a laptop/PC which looks around the network for things to corrupt/destroy. Various scenarios could be used.
So, I’ve moved all our photos etc… to a private share. This works great, and my WD TV live supports this fine, as does WD 2go. The only thing which is an issue is the WD photo app as it only supports the public share. Other users have complained re this limitation. Does anyone know if WD is planning address as I would think its an easy enough problem to fix? As I’m unwilling to go back to using the public share, which basically makes this app useless.
I’m considered doing something with symlinks on the My Duo Live itself, but suspect this will cause other issues.
Comments?
Note, I can really recommend the WD TV live, it really complements the WD my duo live, as it provides all the missing functionality around thumbnails/playlists etc…
This has been annoying me too. If a private share is set for media streaming, then WD photo app(s) should be able to pick up media from these shares (provided the user has the correct access rights).
Darkstar, in your comments you mention having anonymous teenagers deleting data. Yet it is you who gives them access to your password protected Wifi network… They could just as easliy delete files from any shared folders on your computer as the folders on the My Book Live Duo. The mobile apps need to be “paired” to the My Book Live Duo, either by, again, you giving the mobile device access to your password protected WiFi network or by creating an activation code that you create on the My Book Live Duo yourself. The engineers feel that this provides enough security to your Public folder without having to write new code to allow for private share access for the WD Photos application. One suggestion I could provide is to see if your router has the option to setup a “Guest” wireless account. This will allow guests in your home to access the internet wirelessly without having access to any of your local network devices.
hear what your saying but i think you may not understand the issue im explaining. In giving any guests/teenages access to my wifi network to access the internet, they also get full right access to my wd live public folder, they could access and delete data. Likewise i have no issues with giving them access to watch movies on their moble device through dlna, which wouldnt work if i setup a guest wifi access for them.
Thats not the main worry, more concerning is virsus/trogans on any PC either on the wired or wireless lan could do the same.
Having been in professional IT 18 years, and developed open source applications in linux i cant see if being too much of an issue to add this.
Just another thought There is a number of posts of people requesting this feature if you search through the forums. Likewise, there is some highly experienced WD My Duo Live owners who hack their devices to make public shares more secure. Id rather not resort to that for a few different reasons. Really hoping you reconsider this as something which woud be a useful addition to the product.
hopefully I’m not breaking any rules posting this here…
ok, i’ve got a dirty hack to this. if you are comfortable sshing onto the nas and editing some files this seems to work. only do this if you know unix/linux. if you break it I dont bear any responsibility, basically do this at your own risk
ok, first ssh onto the nas. instructions elsewhere on the forum for this.
edit /etc/samba/overall_share
and change the [Public] share section to
writable = no
this is all you need to do if you don’t want to allow the public share writable.
now if you want to also keep the files in the private share (because its tidier this way as everything for me is in the private share)
ive tested a safepoint as well with this and it seems to work, fortunately they use rsync which is smart enough not to copy symlinks, so you don’t duplicate a backup. so all looks good
you’ll most likely need to redo this mod after a firmware upgrade.
“WD Photos” is unusable form me (and for others many people i think).
I created “my photos” folder as private folder to sharing my private pictures with all my device and, most important, to upload my iPhone album as soon as my iPhone disk space is not enough.
Take in account for next “WD Photos” application upgrade please.
First of all if my english is not good enough I’m sorry.
I’m also thinking that is a good idea, even better a MUST HAVE idea. I hate if my family looks my photos and at the same time they don’t like that I can access to their private photos. As darkstar says, guest network is not a solution cause my family use MBL to watch movies or listening music and save their phots.
So implement this idea, it’s was pubblished almost a year ago.
P.s. for Timothy. As you say “…The engineers feel that this provides enough security to your Public folder without having to write new code to allow for private share access for the WD Photos application…” your engineers are skivers. Tell them if they like their sons look their private photos with her husband / his wife. And i think there is no new code to write, just a few lines, “WD My Cloud” app works great just copy the code for autoupload images by “WD Photos” and paste on “WD My Cloud” or vice versa
WD Photo should allow to us to choose the destination folder.
I have an Android phone doing automatic backup in this folder, and having this information “Public” is just not the best.
Why isn’t WD Photos using a separate folder as Smartware does?
Fortunately I found a post in this forum where you can restrict access to users for the Public folder (even if it’s not meant to be done) and tha partially solved my issue. However, a permanent-official fix will be preferable.
TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY AGREE. this is something i expected but really surprised to learn that it was not available. now my pictures are visible by anyone on my network and that is a HUGE concern for me. Please rectify this ASAP.
You have a million votes from me! I belive this is a must have feature! You should be able to choose where to auto upload your pictures and videos, public folder or not
There is a number of posts of people requesting this feature if you search through the forums. Likewise, there is some highly experienced WD My Duo Live owners who hack their devices to make public shares more secure. Id rather not resort to that for a few different reasons. Really hoping you reconsider this as something which woud be a useful addition to the product.