I just bought an EX2 and was wondering if there’s going to be SFTP support anytime soon. The last post about this was more than a year ago and it looked like someone was able to alter the firmware to get it to work. I don’t want to do that so I just want to find out if WD will support this anytime soon.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, development roadmaps for updates or new features are usually not provided to the public in advance. What you can do is search for an Idea suggesting the same or similar improvements and add your vote to increase awareness.
Network Product Ideas
https://community.wdc.com/c/network-attached-storage/network-product-ideas
gnsallman - Yes, that is me that you are referring to who succeeded to get SFTP to work, shortly after EX2’s launch, by altering the firmware (https://community.wd.com/t/sftp-possible-on-ex2/98186). Technically, you can SFTP to the EX2 as-is but only as the root (sshd) user…because SFTP uses SSH and that is the only user allowed to have SSH access. I can tell you that there is 0% chance WD will open SSH access to non-root users (pretty much all NAS products from other vendors have this limitation too). And that means there is 0% chance that SFTP will be enabled for non-root users. So forget about anytime soon, it will NEVER happen…and don’t bother voting on this Network Ideas thread (https://community.wd.com/t/please-support-sftp/96973). I unfortunately have seen only a handful requested ideas…and given that implementing SFTP access (i.e. enabling SSH access for non-root users) presents a big security risk, not to mention all sorts of headaches for WD Support, you can rest assured that the only way to use SFTP will be via firmware change.
However, if modding/hacking the firmware is not an option for you, I would point out that EX2 does support another encrypted file transfer mechanism… FTPS. Of course, FTPS is very different thing than SFTP (in my setup users’ public keys are used for password-less logins)…but that is your only secure file transfer option out of the box.
Hi Cybernut1,
I did see that SSH is possible. But I would like to be able to easily transfer files from the drive to my computer and SSH makes that a little difficult. Can you explain how FTPS works? I want to be able to use an FTP client to transfer files easily outside of my home network but want my password encrypted.
