Safe shutdown

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
61

Turning power off to the My Cloud is not a good idea. It can cause loss of data. It also causes
the system to fsck the disk partitions because they were not shutdown properly.

62

Why is everyone so intent on shutting down a device that was never intended to be shut down? Cloud devices and other full-time backup and recovery devices are designed to be up 24/7 and that is why there is no shutdown option.

As others have stated, pulling the power on these devices can lead to serious problems unless you have taken all precautions to ensure that access if fully stopped - not always a simple matter.

Just my 2 cents worth.

63

Not sure why you quoted my post. The bottom line is there is a shutdown command on the Dashboard for v3.x/v4.x firmware, and a Shutdown command in the WD QuickView program for v2.x firmware. The various SSH commands in my post that was quoted are standard linux shutdown commands.

Since using the shutdown command ever night I no longer have occasional media file corruption which I was having from time to time when I pulled power without issuing the shutdown command.

The problem, at least with the older first gen My Cloud is even when you issue the Shutdown command and the OS/hard drive shut down and the front LED is no longer lit, the networking port still is drawing power and the LED’s continue to operate.

As to the other poster’s question about why would you want to shut down the unit. Why not? Yes it is designed to be left on 24/7 but there are times when one may wan to turn the unit off for a period of time for what ever reason. In my case I shut my My Cloud down at night when not in use along with my other computers/network/broadband equipment. No sense in having a power draw, as small as it is with the My Cloud, when the unit isn’t being used for long stretches of time. Shrugs, to each their own.

64

Generally via SSH when issuing the Shutdown command followed by “-h” you are issuing the “halt” command. General info on Linux shutdown commands at this link: http://www.binarytides.com/linux-command-shutdown-reboot-restart-system/

Unfortunately for what ever reason when one issues the command, either via SSH, the Dashboard, or QuickView to shut down the My Cloud there apparently (at least for the older v4.x firmware version) still power being drawn by the backplane since the network port continues to operate/draw power. The network LED’s continue to show network traffic even though the front LED is off and the drive appears to be shut down (not spinning).

65

I used your response because it had the plink commands. The plink commands are an easy
way to perform shutdown/poweroff/halt with just a batch file. No need to enter the dashboard.
I also think the commands will work on both versions gen1 and gen2.

66

Ah, understood. I misunderstood your post quoting my previous post. :smiley:

Currently I use an SSH app on my Android phone to issue the shutdown command to the My Cloud when I don’t use it for long periods of time. I also have batch files (to run Plink) on several of my PC’s to shutdown the My Cloud too, much faster than using the Dashboard since I don’t use any of the WD software (QuickView or the like).

67

@Bennor

Re: “shutdown -h now” not being equivalent to the “halt” command.
This is also true for the later, (2.n), firmware too.

Additionally when restarting after having done this, the GUI gives a warning that the system was not shutdown properly and that a disk check is taking place.

The only way I have discovered to do a frosty-cold, dead-as-a-doorknob shutdown is via SSH and the halt command.

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I strongly suspect that the “shutdown” command as it currently exists, is yet another example of a half-implemented feature within the My Cloud. What appears to happen, (AFAIK), is that the shutdown command puts the system to sleep and spins down the drive, (without closing or un-mounting it) - with the NIC and backplane active. I suspect that this was one half of a “wake-on-lan” implementation where the device would enter a power-saving state, waiting for something to happen. Since the other half of “wake on lan” does not seem to have been implemented, (again, AFAIK), it is both useless as Teats on a Boar Hog, and deceptive to the unwary.

Additionally, (at least within the context of the 2.n firmware), the tricks for hacking the CSS to restore the shutdown button do not work as that code is within the firmware and cannot be modified.

IMHO, expecting the user to do this using QuickView is short-sighted. Not everyone will have a Windows system running. Not everyone will be allowed to, and/or may not want to, install a thousand extra utilities just to perform simple system tasks for every blasted device on their network. It ignores the users who may be using tablets, smartphones, or other web-only interfaces.

IMHO, the My Cloud, (as the successor to the My Book World systems, of which I have one), is an excellent piece of work. What I don’t understand is why these features remain un-implemented. I can understand a “push to market” for the first release, however I would have expected that the rest of the implementation would have been fleshed-out in subsequent firmware updates.

What say ye?

Jim (JR)

1 Like
68

On my older v4.x version single bay My Cloud when using the shutdown -h -P command the My Cloud Dashboard does not give a “warning” about the system being shutdown improperly. Instead once the My Cloud is restarted (or powered back on) the My Cloud Dashboard alert section only indicates “System restart”.

Could be there is a difference, as you speculate, between the shutdown command used on the newer v2.x firmware single bay My Cloud (which runs a form of Busybox) and the older v3.x/v4.x single bay My Clouds (which run Debian). Generally with Linux using the “-h” with Shutdown is supposed to issue the halt command as the system gracefully shuts down. And the “-P” switch is supposed to issue the power down command. Perhaps this isn’t the case with the v2.x firmware. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case considering the various other things that are going on with these modified Linux firmwares used on the My Clouds.

69

I’d bet money on it.

There are so many other differences between the older (4.n) and the newer (2.n) devices that listing even a small fraction of them here would risk crashing the forum software with a buffer overflow! :grinning:

In one of these fora, (I forget which one), I believe it was Bennor, (Oops!, It was cpt_paranoia in this posting), who said that God Himself only knows why the folks at WD decided to fork the code-base between the original 4.n models and the newer 2.n version.

Maybe there was a good reason, I don’t know - and it appears the folks at WD aren’t telling. Whatever the reason of forking the code-base might have been, one would think that maintaining a degree of functional similarity would have been part of the design spec.

Sigh. . . .

Jim (JR)

70

This, perhaps
?

71

I said. . . .

I can’t say for sure, but I think I have an answer for - at least - part of this.

I just did a tear-down on my trusty Gen-2 (2.n firmware) My Cloud (6Tb), placed the hard drive in a drive-dock attached to a machine running Linux Mint 17, and did some snooping around.

After thoroughly examining all seven of the partitions on the device, (yes, seven!), I noticed something interesting. There is no operating system anywhere on the drive that I can find. I did find a recovery image, but no software (or even a squashfs filesystem), anywhere. There was a LOT of stuff that would be expected to vary system-to-system, temp files and such, but no OS.

<img src=“//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wd/original/3X/5/0/508d36ffde032359630d3156ab74bcd70d70ce4a.png” width=“683” height=“500"”>

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the OS is hard-flashed to the device’s firmware.

One reason for doing this would be to move the OS off of the disk providing more room for the customer’s stuff. (Or for the paranoid out there :laughing:, a move to “lock-down” the software to prevent blithering idiots like us from tweaking it. . .)

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a guess, and until someone tells us more, I sure don’t know.

Jim (JR)

72

You could just post it on pastebin or reddit. I would actually like to hear your opinion. My personal unit has died twice due the drive failing from 24/7 operation.

73

Huh?

Is this spam or did I miss something along the way?

Jim (JR)

74

No it isn’t spam I was just saying you could post your full uncensored
opinion on pastebin and just leave a link.

75

Hey Guys,

I recently bought my WD My Cloud NAS 4TB 2nd Gen and just like some of you having problems with shutdown, so did I. On firmware 2.x


I contacted WD via email and finally got a solution. Hope this helps you guys out who are still having problems.

Download the ‘WD Quick View’ Application.

Click in the link below and click in downloads:

After that, click in the lower right corner of your computer > click in WD Quick View > select the My Cloud and click in shut down. ​

Hope this helped you guys. Good day

76

Yes. using the QuickView application has been mentioned several times earlier in this discussion (like in this post for example) as the way to shut down v2.x single bay My Cloud units because the Shutdown option is currently missing (actually hidden via CSS coding) from the My Cloud Dashboard.

77

Hi all, may someone please paste the halt command so that I may copy it into my SHH Button app?

Fwiw I’m an ex2100 user and am getting a wifi power point to kill power to the board feeding my router ap, switch, and the NAS. I don’t need the NAS on 24/7 and want to avoid the power bill over the years.

I will automate the shutdown using Trigger and a bedside NFC tag

I love this thread! Great work @jharris1993 and all :grinning:

78

My post near the begining ot the thread has the halt command (“-h”) used in conjunction with the shutdown command. Do an internet search for the ssh shutdown command and you’ll see the “-h” is issuing the Halt command. For example here are to links that explain the Linux Shutdown and Halt commands.

Shutdown: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ushutdow.htm

Halt: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uhalt.htm

79

There’s really nothing to paste.

On a v2 My Cloud, all you need to do is to SSH into the Cloud device, and type “halt”. That, and hitting the “Enter” key, is all you have to do. Bennor’s command, (shutdown -h now), is for the v1 (4.n firmware) device as that uses different firmware.

As I mentioned in my reply to the PM you sent me, there is an Android app, X-plore file manager, (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lonelycatgames.Xplore) that contains a built-in SSH/file transfer feature that I use to control the My Cloud via Android.

Jim

1 Like
80

I too control the shutdown of the My Cloud from my Android device. I use the SSH Button app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pd7l.sshbutton&hl=en). Makes it real easy, one you program in a command, to hit the button entry to shut down the My Cloud or perform some other action like a restart. Use it almost every night to shut down the My Cloud

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