I’ve been managing remote servers for nearly 2 years, Debian Wheezy usually running nginx but for my MBL Apache would be okay. I learned the hard way you don’t want to apt-get upgrade on a MBL, you’ll create a lot of irreconcilable dependencies because MBL uses a custom version (repository) and you’ll create a bunch of problems, maybe brick it.
It occurs to me that it would be so simple if I could just delete the Lenny depositories and add my favorite Wheezy repositories, delete all the “bloatware” (sorry WD, I just want a NAS not a media device). But I’m not sure if there is any way to get around WD’s custom stuff. I can live without the LED and without the user interface. I’m used to running remote servers where my only choices are (1) SSH into it and fix it, or (2) have my host re-image it.
I just want to get a plain jane Wheezy installed, add RAID and Samba and my heart’s pick of any Wheezy package I want, and end up with a NAS and nothing but a NAS.
Is there any way to do that?
Actually I’d be tempted to install nginx instead of Apache (nginx easier to work with, arguably better performance), MySQL and configure it for serving local websites. (You use your hosts file to access them.)
This post is just intended to hook up with other techies who feel the same.
I’m sorry if this sounds rude but that is naive of you to think that WD will implement the idea that “Hey let’s take out all the WD stuff and just make it a plain NAS.”
Without all the media junk it’s just some HDDs connected to the Ethernet running Samba (file sharing) and administrated via SSH. It’s taking away everything WD put into it to distinguish their product.
Unfortunately there are people like me who don’t want the media junk because (1) I never had any useful experience using my WD TV and the media server, (2) mediacrawler thrashes your disk incessantly if you have like 100K images or maybe 100K songs, it can never catch up and index everything. Heck, I could have 250K images. And index them by date? Date means nothing! I have them logically sorted into folders. I don’t want to see individual songs or images, I just want the folders indexed. But the media player has been a poor experience for me, and anyway I use my storage mainly for text files, PDFs, spreadsheets.
I don’t need a media server. I need a NAS. I need a NAS that isn’t all junked down with all the media stuff. And definitely NO REMOTE ACCESS!!! I have confidential data on my drives and the very last thing I’d ever want is for it to be accessible from outside my local network.
I don’t want to turn it all off. I want to take it all OUT. It eats resources and slows down the NAS transfer rate. I just want a plain NAS.
This is the kind of idea that WD will read once and discard. It’s asking them to take out all the stuff they labored over to put in. They would never do that. The only hope is if commando engineers like me figure it out on our own: how to rebuild MBL and make it a pure Debian file server with absolutely no remote access and no media stuff.
