Connecting to the Dashboard remotely

[eric99]

Hi All,

I purchased an EX2 to be used as a ‘Cloud’ for a bunch of us photographers. Connecting through my LAN I see where I can set the Dashboard for remote access. I turned that switch to ‘On’.

Ok, how do I connect to the Dashboard remotely? If I’m gone for 10 days I can’t make any changes such as adding a new photographer until I get home?

If WD doesn’t want to support this, are there any NAS storage solutions that will allow what I’m looking for?

eric99

[lluna]

Hi, there is a way that you can enable remote access to the dashboard, the feature is called Dashboard Cloud Access and you can take a look at the manual in This Link.

Note: Make sure that you are able to forward the port 8080 to the IP address of the drive in order for this to work. Also keep in mind that this is not a secure connection to the dashboard.

[Great_Scottt]

Hi @eric99 - I think you are confusing remote access to the dashboard with remote access to the drive. You most certainly can upload photos remotely to the drive. The instructions @lluna provided below will allow you to access the DASHBOARD remotely, which will let you do things like adjust settings etc. while you are away.

Also keep in mind that because its not secure [in this configuration], someone could theoretically get in there and cause all sorts of trouble for you - unless you absolutely need the ability to update settings on the fly, I highly recommend keeping this feature off.

For information on how to upload your photos remotely see:

http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=13190

EDIT: If you need to add users, yes you would need to have remote access enabled or have a way to remotely access a computer on your network (I personally use Teamviewer - I keep a copy installed on my home machine and if I need to access anything on my network (router, cloud dashboards, etc.) I just do it “locally” - this is far more secure, and less likely to bite you down the line) which of course must be left running.

[Cybernut1]

@Great_Scott - Why do you say that the dashboard is not secure? If you have setup a reasonably strong password, the dashboard is quite secure. Yes, I agree, making the dashboard remotely accessible is not a good idea for less tech-savvy folks, and definitely not needed to access files on the NAS, but I do not agree with your broad statement that the dashboard is not secure (for added security you can access it using https connection, as long as port 443 is forwarded on the router). I myself have left my dashboard open for remote access for over a year (but I also have enabled logging on the http server of my EX2) and yes, there are daily intrusion attempts in the logs, but nobody has been able to do actually break into anything. I also have enabled remote SSH access to my EX2 and so far it has not been breached either. Here are two links to my posts from last year about logging EX2’s web server and SSH daemon:

Logging shell break-in attempts

Given the recent ShellShock security vulnerability in the news, I thought I’d post this. Little background first. I have been using my EX2 primarily as an SFTP server for the past 7 months that I owned it, and that’s because I was able to figure out a way to enable non-root user access to the shell. That was tricky and requires compiling custom firmware. But assuming nearly 100% of users are not going to do that or be able to do that even if they wanted to, most folks, at best can just access t…

Enabling logging for lighttpd web server

EDIT: Please ignore the below instructions as these have now been rendered obsolete with the switch from lighttpd to a different webserver (Apache) with the release of firmware version 1.05.21 on 10/27/14. I may create another post with updated instructions for http logging using Apache, IF I have the time in future. This is a followup post to my recent post titled ’ Share your files with friends using http links’. I wanted to share how you can enable logging on, if you chose to turn the web se…

[Great_Scottt]

@Cybernut1 - Sorry for any confusion there - I was referring to accessing it remotely with a simple port 8080 forward as suggested by lluna above. Using https is of course more secure.