Breathing new life into MBL (new disk/sleep monitoring/miniDLNA/openvpn)

[Lo_Elo]

SLEEP MONITORING

We do not need to look at the LED indicator in front of MBL to understand how long it slept. The easiest way is to use FileZilla to download the file in in /var/log/message:

Look for messages like:

<date/time> MyBookLive logger: exit standby after 2942 (since date/time)

We would have a very good understanding on when MBL slept and how long did it go into standby.

(I only realize this after using the MBL for over 2 years.)

My MBL did sleep in the first few months of usage. With more and more photos loaded, I found that the green LED was on and the drive was spinning. It was quite some time before I googled and found the fix on stopping miocrawler:

WD My Book Live constant disk usage Fix!

The fix worked in my case. Basically, add 1 line ‘exit 1’ into the file /usr/miocrawler/miocrawlerd so that it looked like:

#!/bin/sh
exit 1

Reboot is required after the change.

The blue LED indicator in MBL should be on (if we set enable the ‘hard disk sleep’ function in MBL UI).

Just in case this did not work, we can also stop mediacrawler as per this link:

Runaway mediacrawler: The Ultimate Solution!

Prologue: I purchased a 3TB My Book Live and a 6 TB My Book Live DUO about 6 months ago. The 3TB has worked fine but the 6TB has always had this problem: the disk drives never went to idle, the case was hot (I sometimes got thermal warnings), the status light would blink green even when the Ethernet cable was disconnected. I intended the 6TB (using it in RAID configuration) to be my main archival drive, and spinning the disks 24/7 is a good way to burn it out quickly. Between then and until the…

In summary: SSH into MBL, type

chmod 644 /usr/local/mediacrawler/bin/mediacrawler

Then reboot.

Some more tips:

• The default standby time is 10 minutes but can be changed by editing the file /etc/standby.conf
• If new packages (transmission, minidlna, openvpn etc.) are installed, please ensure all the logs are stored in the ramdisk of /var/log/. There are 3 logs generated by the software openvpn and the file ipp.txt was stored in the working directory causing disk access every 15 minutes, or waking up MBL every 15 minutes. Moving the file ipp.txt to /var/log/ fix the issue.
• I sometime disable swap (with the command swapoff -a) to ensure that system would not wakeup due to insufficient memory. I would rather reduce the swap file size in /etc/fstab instead (since I am not using the default WD DLNA services).
• If the port forwarding rules are set in the router, (not using the uPNP feature of MBL), and, if we are ready to forfeit some function of the UI, there are quite a lot of mods in the link: My book live never sleeps