NFS gone, SMB web config not good enough

G’morning.

I’ve been getting the nag alerts to update the firmware, so I decided to finally do it tonight.  

I’m using my MyCloud EX4 for storing part of my server backups from a lInux machine.   I was doing it over NFS which was fine.  It kept all file owners and permissions, which is exactly what I needed.

I thought switching to CIFS would be easy.  Just change it in fstab and remount.  It didn’t go quite so well.  All the directories and files owned by root and/or didn’t have read permissions for nobody disappeared.

Can you please make the following changes to the interface for people like me?   Pass this on to the systems/dev people who put the firmware together.

[Note to everyone else.  Don’t do any of this.  I had to log in via SSH and manipulate things directly.  I’m a professional, and take all liability for my own mistakes.]

  1. Allow the user root to be accessed via the user panel, and add it to the smbpasswd file.  

Obviously the local user root already exists.  I added it to the smbpasswd file with:
smbpasswd -a root

And I also set the local user password with:
passwd root

  1. Make root a valid option as a user to be allowed to the share. 
    Allow root to be added to the valid users list.

  2. Change /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_* .  1000 is way too low with 16TB.    After the firmware update, it wanted to rebuild the array, and will take 11 days.   I changed them to 99999999 (arbitrarily high number) .  Now it claims 2.54 days.    That could be catastrophic if someone had flaky power.   We’ve been having short power outages here, but the UPSs stayed up the whole time.  If we had a long outage and the generator didn’t kick on (or if I was an average home user) dropping power during a rebuild could fail the array.   I don’t think you want to try to explain over the phone to a novice user how to reassemble a failed array. :slight_smile:

  3. I would have liked it if you had built busybox with chattr.   Tell whoever builds it, they’ll understand.  I wanted to “chattr +i smb.conf”, so nothing would accidentally change my settings back.  I already tested, and if i make any unrelated changes, it reverts them to your settings.   I made a backup, so it won’t be a big deal if it changes in the future.

I only got the EX4 because it was cheaper than building out my own machine to do local storage.  As far as that goes, it’s cute, and seems to work well.   All in all, it doesn’t look bad from the inside.  

And, thank you for having ssh as an option.  i’d hate to have to try to root this thing without it.

Hi JWSmythe, your post sounds more like an idea, I recommend you to post it in the ideas board. You idea might be taken into consideration for future firmware updates. 

http://community.wd.com/t5/Network-Product-Ideas/idb-p/network_ideas

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I’ve posted it over to ideas.  Thanks. :)   I gave you the Kudos and accepted solutions.