Tony, I think the firmware maintenance team need to make a radical change to the MBL in the way it the firmware can be restored. Could it be possible, for example, SSH to be enabled by default but instead of a default pasword of “welc0me”, the default password would be derived from the hard drive’s serial number and also something else that would be unique to the MBL, like the NIC’s MAC address? Obviously if the password has been set to something else then that remains as is. It would only be reset to the calculated default password on a factory reset or pressing the button on the back of the MBL. It addresses . . . .
- SSL is always available to perform diagnostics and recovery.
- If port 22 is accidentally left open to the Internet then it would be close to impossible to a hacker to guess the password.
Another idea is to have a TFTP client operational on the MBL so if the firmware screws up then one could set-up a TFTP service on a computer and the MBL could download the firmware file into itself and put things back? As to what IP address to use? To do this one would have to connect the MBL directly to a computer with the TFTP server running and for the duration of the recovery the computer’s NIC would have to be statically set to 192…168.0.1?
I have a LinkSys router that was destined for the bin, but then discovered the undocumented debricking procedure. Brought the router back to life after a failed firmware update.
Something needs to be done so there remains a route in to recover a poorly MBL should SSH be disabled and the Dashboard UI become dead. Would be a whole heap better than being faced with the one option of sending the MBL back and losing one’s data on it.
On the recovery side of it, whoever designed the MBL needs to to have their head examined.
An honest opinion. Now there is the case of trying to go the best with what one’s got.
WDTony wrote:
This issue has not been replicated yet internally. We have talked to several users to try to get units in to look at, but as far as being widespread, that is far from true. Thousands and thousands of people have upgraded to this version. Our support teams will usually alert us if a firmware upgrade is causing major issues, and that is not the case here. I know this doesn’t help those of you with the issue, but I wanted to let you know that we are trying to ascertain what the exact root cause is. None of our testing over the last two plus months saw any issue like this.
As a quick test, have you done the following.
- Rebooted your My Book Live
2.Try to access it with a .local extention. For example:
On a PC:
http://mybooklive.local
On a Mac:
mybooklive.local. (use a period at the end of the local)