I’ve been reading through the forum about frequent wake-ups of the MyCloud device and there appears to be quite a lot of people with this problem. I too have noticed that my MyCloud is waking every few minutes for no apparent reason and then goes to sleep again. The longest sleep-period it has is around 1500 seconds (from the log) but more often it is only a few hundres seconds. I am new to NAS’s and don’t have much knowledge about network devices so please bear with me if my questions are dumb:
Is the frequent wake-ups normal behaviour or not?
I am quite sure that when i bought this device a month ago it didn’t do this but stayed asleep for several hours.
After the initial content scan, which took a day or so, the device went to sleep and didn’t wake unless called upon.
What has caused this behaviour?
Well, not any firmware updates, because the device updated the firmware when i connected it the first time (i.e. about a month ago) and no firmware updates has been issued since. So for the first couple of weeks, with the latest firmware, the device was sleeping for hours. In this period i haven’t added new content to the device. I basically set it up the first day I bought it and haven’t touched it since. I haven’t bought any new devices that connects to the network and the wake-ups occur even when all network devices are off (except router). So it appears that it is something inside the box that causes the wake-ups.
Would a restore fix this behaviour? If yes, what kind of restore should i perform: system, quick or full?
no, the wake ups are due to the various linux activities; some more nefarious then the others. Even a restore won’t make them go away.
The two major ones are due to scanning for media, of which your system has completed but will start at various times to check for new media.
At the moment, nobody from WD is telling us the reason for the multiple 7 second wakeup call which is probably the worse since it does this just after the drive falls asleep.
There are 12 daily jobs in the cron which include writting logs from ramdisk to hard drive, ntpdate (getting time from server), rotating logs, I believe one is clearing out the apache2 server files, one is clearing out old manuals (I kid you not), and many others.
The renewal of DHCP will wake it up at least once a day.
It should not be normal, but for WD over the last few years since the WD Live, frequent wake-ups are normal because they believe that it is a linux server that runs jobs, indexes files and other activities.
So as I understand you reply It is “normal” in the sense that it just does frequent wake-ups out of the box, and that it is a design “feature”, i.e. it’s not something wrong with my device. Right?
If i’m right then i must presume that my MyCloud has done this since the start. Unfortunately the log I can see (“Create and Save System Report” → log->user) only goes back about one week.
Is there a way to see older entries/logs?
Unfortunately probably not from the regular Web/ui report. You can get a user.log report if you SSH into the device, then the user.log is in /var/log/user.log. Use the linux command cat user.log to see it displayed in the SSH terminal.
However, from the user.log report we do not know what wakes up the device only the timings of the wakeups and duration of the sleep.
I read a couple of threads re. the user.log file, and i know that you can’t see what is waking up the device, but maybe it can settle my mind on whether it’s been doing this from the start. Before messing around with SSH and risking “opening up a can of worms”, could somebody please confirm how far back the user.log file is logging stuff?
If it only logs events for the last week or so, then there is no point in looking in there.
Anyway i am starting to read up a bit on SSH and have some questions:
I would need to enable it in the setup menu and I would need a SSH client on my PC. So far so good. I have googled around a bit and it seems that there a few different SSH clients out there, which one is a good starting point for a novice (on a PC)? PuTTY?
I also did read about SSH in WD FAQ and I seem to remember that SSHing into the device will void warranty, or am I wrong? If i only get into the device using SSH and not changing anything except “extracting” the log would that void warranty?
Once again thanks for your help.
