For those who are interested…sftp is not possible on the EX2 out of the box. But after significant hacking (but perfectly safe) it is possible to run sftp on the box. The sad thing is the box ships with sftp server running right out of the box…but no way for you to connect to the sftp server. That’s because the SSH access is limited to the sshd user out of the box.
To get it to work, you will need to make a few changes…one of which may void your warranty. And that is rebuilding the EX2 firmware using the source code WD put up on their site. Using their code, you just need to make a small change to the sshd_config file allowing any user, who you want to have sftp access, to have ssh access first. Then that user can generate their private-public keys on their machine, login via ssh, copy over their public key and subsequently use sftp from an sftp client.
But when WD ships a product without a working ftp or sftp, how else are customers gonna get use out of a NAS box. FTP is most definitely advertised on the product page but it doesn’t work. WD’s stance is - look we’re gonna sell you with certain features broken, but if you can figure out a way to fix it yourself we’re not gonna be happy about it.
The source code is on the download section of WD’s site…in the support section. The instructions to compile the firmware is in a readme file included with the code.
I figured out how to compile new firmware. I even installed nano editor compiled for amr7 into the firmware. Now I can make all kind of changes and the world seems a lot brighter.
