Troubleshooting tools

[tijuco]

Do you guys know what are (if there’s any) tools available in this crappy OS where I can determine what process is reading/writing on my disks?
Every night my fans go full speed and top won’t give me any hint of what’s happening. Tools like iotop or lsof aren’t available.
I would love to know who’s the ■■■■■ that made the decision to remove everything useful from the OS. Even tcpdump is gone.

[Chris.M]

Hello,

Please refer to the following KBA article: My Cloud: Possible Dashboard Fan Speed and Drive Temperatures

[tijuco]

Hi Chris, that information is already available through fan_control

The fact that my fan goes on when my NAS is supposedly idle is the problem, and I’m looking for tools that give me the cause.
The possible causes are, high CPU usage, which we can use top to check that, or the disks are active and generating heat, which is the probable cause, but WD removed the tools that could tell me what’s being done on my disks.
What’s the point of having SSH access if WD OS has fewer tools than a $10 router?

[mogzol]

I know this is an old thread, but it came up in my google search while looking for a way to run iotop, which I was eventually able to do, so I thought I would post my solution here. I was able to compile iotop for my EX4100, I think it should work for any of the arm-based my cloud devices.

Here is the compiled binary for iotop v1.27: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1S-JLpt46cDRGhjQ2AL1EA3lXziCHPtNe

To run it you need to set the TERM environment variable to “xterm”, and sorting doesn’t work properly when showing threads, so you should start it with the “-P” option to only show processes:

TERM=xterm ./iotop -P

If you don’t want to use a random binary from the internet (understandable) you can compile it yourself using docker. Here are the steps, note that these should all be run on your computer, not on the NAS:

1. Start an armv7 ubuntu 22.04 docker container (newer versions of ubuntu had issues for me):

   docker run --platform=linux/arm/v7 --rm -it -v $(pwd):/build arm32v7/ubuntu:22.04 bash
   

2. Install dependencies for building iotop:

   apt update && apt install git build-essential libncurses-dev libncursesw5-dev pkg-config -y
   

3. Clone the iotop repo and build iotop (you’ll get warnings about statically linking, but its fine):

   git clone https://github.com/Tomas-M/iotop
   cd iotop
   CFLAGS="-static" make
   

4. Copy the built file out of the docker container:

   cp iotop /build/iotop
   

5. There should now be an iotop file in the directory where you started docker from. This is the compiled binary, you should be able to copy it over to your NAS and run it.