Debian or BusyBox?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud Mirror
1

Hello all,

Can somebody confirm whether the My Cloud Mirror runs on BusyBox v1.20.2 like the EX2 or on debian like the My Cloud / old My Book Lives?

I would switch in a heartbeat as I was very dissapointed when I SSH’ed into my EX2 and found how limited it was (BusyBox).

Thanks!

2

Hello,

I recommend you contact support directly to verify if they can provide you with this information.

Personal Cloud Support

3

interested in the same. did you find out? or can anyone confirm?

4

Busybox

It seems to be on a very similar firmware base as the EX2  (whilst the firmwares are different, they share versioning info and release dates).

5

Y’all are talking as if BusyBox is its own distribution or a substitute of Linux.

It’s not.

BusyBox is just a shell command / utility replacement.

6

Yes but it’s got some major disadvantages, for example, ash is the default shell, it doesn’t support alt deleting or alt moving back and forward, so you have to watch it slowely move through a string character by character…also there is NO persistence, if I install anything, or change my default bash, or anything, it’ll all be wipped next time my device boots (and since I don’t want to waste energy, mine is scheduled to turn off every night).
It shouldn’t need to come to having to go through and find the launch script that sets up and installs everything to be able to just customize something so small. It also uses DSA SSH rather than RSA, which is what I think causes me to have to delete it’s entry from my known_hosts file EVERY time I want to SSH into it after it’s been restarted…(the IP is the same, also means I can’t setup SSH keys either, if I wanted to SSH without entering my password each time, because the key file gets deleted each night…)

7

shayan wrote:

…

It also uses DSA SSH rather than RSA, which is what I think causes me to have to delete it’s entry from my known_hosts file EVERY time I want to SSH into it after it’s been restarted…(the IP is the same, also means I can’t setup SSH keys either, if I wanted to SSH without entering my password each time, because the key file gets deleted each night…)

The reason everytime you reboot, you must accept new server keys is because the server generates a new pair of keys in /etc/ssh and after every reboot when you first ssh in, your ssh client comes across a new server key. It has nothing to do with the server using DSA keys.

And though very tricky, there is a way to login using keys without entering password but it will require building your own custom firmware using the firmware source code, which may void your warranty. I would only advise one to try this if they are very comfy with linux and understand shell scripting.

To login using keys, you will be using your public key stored in authorized_keys file and I am sure you are familiar with that process. That .ssh directory containing authorized_keys file and really the whole root user’s home directory needs to be backed up with permissions intact in a persistent location, like under /usr/local/config/. Then in the firmware code in the system_init script, right after ssh_daemon has started you will need to copy that backed up root user’s directory from /usr/local/config back to /home/root.

There is also a way to add non-root users to the ssh login, using this technique but with a couple additional steps, and they can use passwordless logins using only key pairs. But it is tricky and you’ll need to figure those couple addtional steps, if you want to implement this in your custom firmware.

8

@TonyPh12345: Yes, you are right, we are comparing apple with pears :slight_smile: For me, there is nothing wrong with Busybox per se. However, whenever WD uses Busybox on their NAS’ (EX2, EX4, Cloud Mirror), it comes with a very customized Linux build that wipes everything away after a reboot. That’s why “WD-Busybox” is a no-go for me. I want to run MySQL server and some rsync cronjobs as well as wget/curl backup cronjobs on my NAS. This works perfectly fine (=persistent after reboot) on the Debian WD-NAS on my older Live Duo.

@all

You can overcome the changing SSH keys problem by using:

ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no sshd@nas

If you need to automate logins, you could also use sshpass instead of authorized_keys:

sshpass -f mypasswordfile.txt ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no sshd@nas

Cheers, SoftIce

9

Do you have a pointer to the firmware source code? And do you know if it’s complete, ie. if it can be built to exactly replicate the binary firmware that ships with the device?

10

Firmware source code is on their downloads section of WD’s site and yes, the cource code is complete and firmware can be built to replicate the binary that ships with the device (they actually provide source of every firmware version released so you can compile and install any version manually).