FTP Access

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Hey,

I have a My Book Live and I do not want to use MioNET… I would like to setup FTP access so I can upload music files from my computer that is at a different house (so it’s on a different network).

Can someone give me or direct me to a user-friendly guide on how to setup FTP access? I am using an Apple airplay router.

Thanks!

2

Don’t know how to use that particular router, but what I did to allow external access is to create a DynDNS account, get my router to send it’s allocated IP address to my free DynDNS domain, create a reserved DHCP entry for the Mybook Live on my router so the router is always allocated the same IP address and set-up single port forwarding to allow FTP data traffic from the Internet to be sent on to the MyBook live. You could assign a static IP address on the MyBook live if your router can not reserve an IP addresses for a MAC address on your LAN.

Obviously I enabled the FTP option on the My BookLive.

That’s the abbreviated version.  On which bits do you require more concise instructions?

1 Like
3

Myron,

Did you just forward port 21 or others too?

What kind of speeds do you get over a remote transfer?

Did you modified your vsftpd.config file in anyway.

I ask this because I have been over the past month or so trying to get this to work properly but wuth no luck. My remote transfer speeds are so low it’s not usable.

I have tested also with a different FTP server on my network and I don’t get this problem. If you can shine some light on this it would be appreciated.

Take Care

4

On my router I only have set-up a single-port forward that that is indeed port 21. The majority of routers do seem to have the ability to handle FTP traffic and protocols pretty well.  If they don’t the there are things to try without te need to mess about without the inside workings of the MyBook Live.

I have modified the vsftpd.conf file but only really to improve security. Through FTP I’ve hidden and denied access to the Public directory, changed the banner to some quote, set max_per_ip to 2 and confihured vsftpd to delay showing Invalid Login to unauthorised attempts for about a minute. Obviously keeping a copy of the original configuration file. I don’t wish to change too much because firstly I did buy is as network addressed storage so have no desire to increase it’s functionality by adding feature packs. Secondly, I think if I make too many changes then future updates from Western Digital may fail.  I curious how many software modified MyBook Lives’ may end up either not taking a future update or end up being bricked by a future official firmware update.

I use a dynamic DNS service DynDNS mostly because the router directly supports the use of this free service so I can find my home netowrk, but I guess you already know how to do this.  :smiley:

Now…  Down to the issue of speed…

From a friend’s house I transfered a short movie file from my phone to my MyBook Live and the statistics for that was 2390144 bytes, 78.24Kbyte/sec.  I think the transfer speed is because of the slow speed of the phone.

What is your upload speed?

I think this is going to be a bit hard for me to answer because at my end it simply worked perfectly out-of-the-box. (Have you made alterations to how you MyBook Live’s operating system behaves?)

What is your upload and download bandwidth of your Internet connection?

This next bit may sound stupid, but have you tried stopping the Twonky and iTunes servers and seeing if the transfer speed of the MBL’s FTP server improves? Object of this excercise it to try the simple things first.

Really, me (and everyone else) need more information to try answer this.

(PS: What’s the transfer speed right after the MBL’s been rebooted?)

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5

The other test FTP server on my network and have tested remote transfers and haven’t  suffered from any speed problems at all, get similar speeds as you 70/80KB/s as my line’s upload speed is just under 1MB.

I’ve tried a number of things you suggested and some of my own based on investigation to try and get this fixed, disable Twonky, iTunes, fresh reboot, but always get very low speeds.

The highest remote peek transfer speed I’ve been able to get is about 8KB/s but it usually steadies out to around 5KB/s, unusable.

Even though I believe it’s a MBL software bug and I really don’t want to but I suppose I’ll have to do a full restore and test again :cry:.

Thanks for your time.

P.S Has anybody tried, with the latest firmware 01.04.06, to upload a saved configuration file to their MBL?, mine accepts it but dosen’t seem to restore anything. 

6

dunno, why you getting any speed problems. I dont see any way this can be related to MyBook Live. For me its working perfect - max speed (up & down) = my line speed. And its always going max.

Maybe your ISP just sux… capping or something. Try to move ftp to other port than default 21.

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7

I don’t understand either.

It must be some kind of configuration problem with the MyBook Live as I have specifically setup another test ftp server on my network with the same port 21 forwarded to it and have no problem with transfers, max speed, so no ISP capping.

Jazzymood,

how have you set your MyBook Live’s IP address, static or dhcp?

Thanks anyways

8

Did you change the MTU setting, by chance?

9

TonyPh12345 wrote:
Did you change the MTU setting, by chance?

I haven’t changed it on either, I don’t even know how to change it on the MyBook Live.

When I get a chance to copy all my contents over I’ll do a full factory restore, if it lets me, and retest.

Thanks for your help.

10

@Gingernut : LAN ip for MyBook Live is of course static.

11

I’m trying to setup FTP access as well and I can’t seem to get it to work.  Ive also registered for for DynDNS and have my IP address registered.  I’m just kind of lost on what to do now.  I have port forwarding setup so port 21 goes to the IP address of my MyBook Live.  I’m not sure what to be doing.  Can anyone help?

12

What’s the make and model of the router?  Also, what is the firmware version of your router.

Something else…  Who is your ISP?  It is possible that your Internet Service Provider is blocking FTP access.  I had this with the last company I worked with where on the company Internet account I has to put in a request to their technical support to enable inbound FTP connections from the Internet.