Hoping someone might be able to help with this. I installed Hamach using these (very clear) instructions to have an alternative to wd2go.com when away from my LAN. (Mac users will understand just how convoluted a process it is to get your My Cloud mounted on the desktop while off-network using wd2go.com. And yes, I know the WD My Cloud app works great, but I want the shares actually mounted on my desktop, not just accessible through an app.)
The good: Seems to work great! I set up a Hamachi “gateway” network with the My Cloud as the gateway node and installed the client on my Mac. Left my LAN for another network and appeared to be in instant VPN heaven. Sayonara Java, and adios to all the silly steps needed to get wd2go.com working.
The bad: As long as the Hamachi daemon is running on the My Cloud, Time Machine can’t find the share for Time Machine backups. It appears that Hamachi makes it very difficult for “.local” host names to resolve, and while using the Time Machine preference pane, it seems that it requires “[myCloudName].local” to resolve properly in order to recognize that share on the My Cloud as an available backup destination.
The so-so: Adding a line or two to /private/etc/hosts on my Mac with the local IPs and hostnames sorta-kinda solves the problem. Browser windows or Terminal sessions pointed at a “.local” hostname will start working again. But Time Machine still won’t see its backup share on the My Cloud… All of which seems to mean that while on my LAN I need to keep the Hamachi daemon disabled, and when I’m off-network I need to remember to flip it on again using “update-rc.d…enable/disable”.
If anyone has any suggestions on how I might get the 2 to work together, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!
Hopefully some of the user can provide you some information about this.
Did you tried asking the guy who wrote the guide?
I haven’t asked the author of that guide. Since it seemed pretty clear to me that he was working with a PC/Windows, I thought a better source of advice would come from Hamachi support (“It’s beta, and we don’t support it. Check in with the forum…”) and from its forum (no reply).
I’ve fiddled for many hours getting over my Linux/command-line phobia, installing and tweaking packages for Hamachi and CrashPlan. I’ve had some fun, and they work, but there’s always a catch: hostname resolution with Hamachi and very slow transmission rates of backup data to CrashPlan’s servers (on its headless client guide page, Code 42 does clearly discourage installing CrashPlan on ARM systems!!!).
In the end I decided that all the tweaking and catches and caveats weren’t really worth it, so I threw in the towel and upgraded my firmware to the v4 update that was released a couple weeks ago. To preserve my sanity, I immediately drove solid wooden spikes deep into the hearts of the wdmcserverd and wdphotodbmergerd daemons, and I stamped a permanent mental note in the back of my brain to do so again after any new FW update. If I want to play some more with Debian, I’ll just buy a Rasberry Pi and knock myself out with it. For now the My Cloud’s just going to sit working away on my bookshelf, undisturbed. I’m happy (mostly). The My Cloud’s happy. Everything’s copacetic.
Hamachi sure does seem like a clever and relatively simple solution to remote VPN acces to the My Cloud (basically what wd2go.com provides, right?), for morons like me who don’t have dynamic DNS and a spare PC at home on which to configure a VPN server, and who, even if they did, would spend days of their lives figuring out how to make it work. And Hamachi’s also free for networks with up to 5 computers and/or mobile devices. Pretty cool. I do hope someone figures it out. Or better yet, include it some future FW release.
