Dear Linux users (esp. noob Linux users),
In this post, I supply instructions about how I got this device mounted over the network on my home Linux workstation, that is running Debian Wheezy.
There are at least two other posts about this topic, but neither answers the question in detail, and I was not able to “reply” to either one because, apparently, the admins closed the thread.
First of all, the MyCloud EX2 is actually a small computer running Linux. In spite of using a lot of free tech that the free software community has developed, Western Digital fails to acknowledge this anywhere on the box or in the documentation. Not only does WD fail to acknowledge the contribution that many others have made to this product, it also fails to acknowledge that the device is Linux compatible, or indeed offer any explicit assistance to Linux users, the very community from which they have taken the technology without acknowledgement.
I plugged the device into my wireless router and found its address at 192.168.2.10. Then I put this number into the URL field for my browser in order to see the web interface. On this web interface, I went to Settings -> Network and turned on NFS and SSH. I configured the SSH server by setting a password (the username is “sshd”). You don’t have to do the following part: I logged into the device via
ssh -l sshd 192.168.2.10
Then I could see that the drive lives at /mnt/HD/HD_a2 on the device’s file system. On the web interface, you can set up “Shares” (click on the Shares tab). This just creates a new directory under /mnt/HD/HD_a2, to which soft links are created under /nfs and /share on the device’s file system. Note that you can set (on the web interface) whether the share is writable, and the IP address of the machine that will be mounting the device. In my case, this was 192.168.2.2.
Of course, I can already ssh into the device and use scp or rsync, which others claim will be slow for reasons I won’t go into now. From the command line on my Linux workstation, I created a mount point with:
sudo /mnt/mycloud
Then I was able to mount the device at this location with:
sudo mount -vt nfs4 192.168.2.10:/mnt/HD/HD_a2/ /media/mycloud
Then I could see the device on my own system and I was done. The soft-links to /nfs/mycloud and /shares/mycloud did not work, but perhaps there is a flag in “mount” that allows you to do this.
Good luck,
Ph
