Restore your MC Home. Share remotely and securely to the desktop w $40 WiFi6 Tailscale vpn router- Remote sync and admin as if local

My Cloud Home My Cloud Home Single Bay
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This is basically a repatriation of a core feature of My Cloud Home that was taken away in June 2023 by Western Digital with the deprecation of WD Discovery for desktop OS.

This is not an ad for any company but rather a public service for My Cloud Home owners who needed to restore desktop functionality to their MCH.

This is not dependent on WD servers and is able to work with any local SMB share enable network drive, not just the My Cloud Home.

  1. Install the GL-B3000 as a WiFi 6 replacement router or as an access point to existing router.
  2. Sign up for a free Tailscale account then enable the built-in Tailscale app and ‘Allow Remote Access LAN’ on the GLB router
  3. Install Putty then SSH into GLB router and enter Tailscale subnet router command sudo tailscale up --advertise-routes=192.168.8.0/24 --accept-routes --reset
  4. Go to Tailscale command console and allow subnet routing range that was entered in 3
  5. Test by going to a second subnet such as the Guest WiFi with a second Tailscale enabled PC or laptop and try to access the MCH by ip address.

You should now be able to access and map \\192.168.8.xxx\mch from another subnet over the internet after you enter the credential for ‘Local Access’ of the My Cloud Home for example, on xxx ip and name ‘mch’.

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  • Tailscale is free for personal use.
  • A Tailscale subnet ‘software’ router using a PC or mac is free of charge but once the PC or mac is turned off, the software router is no longer available.
  • GL-B3000 example ‘hardware’ router here is $40 and it will run Tailscale subnet routing as long as it stayed powered. This is probably the best network utility per dollar spent of any device available.
  • Tailscale allows remote access to SMB shares, not just My Cloud Home
  • Tailscale is OAuth2 authenticated sign in.
  • Tailscale is End-to-End encrypted, something not available to iCloud, Google Drive or WD servers
  • Tailscale connection is faster than WD servers. Example below at 30 Mbps or ~6.5 MBps across subnets, copying from one Win10 subnet to a Win11 laptop on a 2nd subnet.

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Remote Mirror Sync with FreeFileSync completed in 1.92 MB/s 1,553 items, 380 MB in 03:17

Notice that the remote My Cloud Home is routed by the $40 GLB 3000 hardware router running Tailscale subnet routing at subnet xxx.8.0/24 and a folder has been mapped by a local laptop as drive M: residing in subnet xxx.1.0/24.

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Tailscale allows remote administration of MCH as if it was local. The My Cloud Home (MCH) here is subnet routed by the $40 GL-B3000 vpn router and the remote admin PC has Tailscale installed and authenticated to have access to the MCH being routed.

Suppose you need to reset the ‘local’ name or password of the My Cloud Home or you need to do a ‘Clear Device Settings’ because some client software messed up the file permission on the MCH and subsequently you lost access to the folders, but you are at a remote admin location? Western Digital does not allow you to do that remotely with the MCH webapp or mobile app because you are not ‘local’.

But with Tailscale, you can because the MCH will appear as ‘local’ to the remote admin webapp.

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