Before one pulls out the crappy SMR HDD in the MCH and pull out one’s own hair trying to get it to run properly with another NAS, realize that it is easier and cheaper in the long run to just back up the MCH to USB now and recover the data that way for backup and future use in another NAS. The 2TB to 6 TB WD SMR HDDs in most MCHs are unsuitable to be used as NAS HDDs.
Also realize that WD Discovery may continue to work for a while longer and June 2023 is not a drop dead date, it is just a warning the end is near for MCH desktop support.
Finally, to answer the question, if one is smart about NAS remote networking, there is another way. The way to access the MCH remotely without any modification to the MCH itself, no hacking of the MCH is required and it is free and it works.** The only condition is it required another network device that must run the Tailscale subnet as the router (could be a physical router that runs Tailscale or even the client Windows or mac running another Tailscale instance in a virtual machine that functions as the subnet router).
**In an ideal scenario, MCH should be made to run Tailscale under its own Debian OS or using Docker for example, but that is probably not going to happen any time soon with WDC.
Subnet routers and traffic relay nodes
Tailscale works best when the client app is installed directly on every client, server, and VM in your organization. That way, traffic is end-to-end encrypted, and no configuration is needed to move machines between physical locations.
However, in some situations, you can’t or don’t want to install Tailscale on each device:
- With embedded devices, like printers, which don’t run external software
- When connecting large quantities of devices, like an entire AWS VPC
- When incrementally deploying Tailscale (eg. on legacy networks)
In these cases, you can set up a “subnet router” (previously called a relay node or relaynode) to access these devices from Tailscale. Subnet routers act as a gateway, relaying traffic from your Tailscale network onto your physical subnet. Subnet routers respect features like access control policies, which make it easy to migrate a large network to Tailscale without installing the app on every device.
