SMB Performance & macOS Connection Issues / WD's response

Hey all, I thought I’d stick a post up to draw attention about the issues I’m facing and the lack of support/respect that WD support gives regarding genuinely trying to help fix issues!

From previous discussions, we can see that users on macOS are having major issues both connecting to SMB shares on My Cloud devices & the performance when they do. A very quick SSH into the device and I can see some of the root causes of our problems…

  • Busybox is using Avahi for Bonjour/mDNS-SD, it has configuration files for AFP, WD Software & Cloud access, but no configuration files for SMB - this means the device is not advertising that it has SMB shares available to clients - which is why you cannot connect from the side bar of a Finder window (if AFP is off) and have to use cmd+d/Connect to from Go menu of macOS instead…

  • The version of Samba is out of date, very out of date (4.0.9)… Yes it supports SMB3 which WD support insists fixes everything, but it doesn’t support any of the features of Samba that would fix the performance issues. That release was Aug 2013 and there were 31 CVE (security) fixes since then - it appears that WD doesn’t care if your data is secure. My point though with this is that for example Samba 4.2 added vfs_fruit module support which greatly improves performance when using macOS as a client (by around 20x!!!). The current release of Samba is 4.5.1

  • AFP has been deprecated by Apple, they have even released a specification for running Time Machine over SMB, which having upgrades and further enhancements to the OS and Samba on MyCloud, would be supported quite easily.

I did raise this including the solutions to WD support expecting it to be dealt with as a bug fix, I was shocked when I received an incredibly rude response, ignoring my time and effort and just telling me off for using SSH, informing me that my warranty was now void and that using SSH was ‘tampering’. This is infuriating considering that the current OS behaviour is to boot from an image, so any SSH changes made are reverted on reboot so please don’t treat me like I’m a moron!

I was also told I don’t need SMB as I’m using a Mac and can use AFP instead as it’s a lot easier (than trying to fix it their end probably!), he also said that it is running the latest SMB3 - he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between SMB and Samba, the software that delivers the service.

It’s annoying that for something as critical as data, it doesn’t matter that it performs badly, or even worse - is incredibly insecure and using standards that even the creator of warns against using and has publicly deprecated. As long as you have spent your money, that’s all that matters right?

I hope WD can see this as being helpful and gives direction to fixing multiple issues for many users, rather than just ignoring us.

Hello,

Thanks for reporting your findings.
WD takes the safe and secure use of our products seriously.
The reported issues are currently under the investigation by our vulnerability and risk assessment teams.

WD Customer Support