I purchased four of these for my business to use for backup data replications. What I found is that the Public share is available to anyone with a Windows computer, without requiring a username and password. This is true on both FW ver 1.01.08 and 1.04.05. I am not able to turn off the public share via the web gui. I did hack the smb.xml file via ssh to restrict this share. But without WD endorsing this fix and assuring us that it won’t screw up anything else, we are all left to wonder if our data is really safe on these boxes.
I have read through all the posts about this on this site and have not seen an acceptable solution from WD. “Don’t use the Public share” is not acceptable. I am not the only user on the network and I already have users exploring and utilizing this share, which takes away from the available storage I have available.
This Public share with access to everyone makes thie very unsecure. I understand the need to make these ■■■■■-proof for novice customers, but there also needs to be some way to turn this off for your expert customers.
The solution is either to make the Public share removable or allow admins to adjust user access to it via the web gui just like any other.
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This has long been a demand and WD has implemented a change to be able to configure the permissions on it (but not remove it entirely), just like any other share, to remove permissions from all users manually from the dashboard, if so desired. This is how it has been working since at least a couple firmware revisions earlier. If your firmware is current then it should work that way on yours too.
Hi,
I have 1.04.05. and can’t find possibility to deny access to Public?
Thx.
Ok, so you do have the latest firmware. You should be able to do it from the web dashboard’s Shares tab…just click the Public share name and then for every user that you would like to deny access to, just click the deny access icon.
Negative, Cybernut1.
I have tried every rev of the firmware available on the WD support site on 2 brand new boxes with no hacks and one user configured after admin. In all cases, the User Access section of the Public share on the Shares tab is greyed-out. The controls appear but are not clickable/changeable.
FW tried:
1.02.03
1.02.06
1.02.08
1.03.41
1.04.04
1.04.05
I have a third box that I used the smb hack on which allowed some access to these controls in the gui, but that is the only time i have seen these controls operational on the Public share.
My apologies - I confused it with a similar issue but not for the EX2 Public share but for the shares of any attached USB hard drives. I just checked in the release notes ( http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/WD_MyCloud_EX2_Firmware_Release_Notes_1.04.05.pdf?v=4646 ) and if you scroll down to page 4, you will see the 4th last item from bottom is what I had in mind. Which obviously is different from what you were looking for. And perhaps I didn’t catch it because I do use an smb hack (that I wrote a HOW-TO article here somewhere a while ago) and forgot that this change was never implemented in a firmware.
I guess you can vote for a long-pending request submitted on this board by clicking on the up arrow to the left of the post - tha registers your vote for this request → http://community.wd.com/t5/Network-Product-Ideas/Delete-Public-Share-Folder-or-Restrict-Access/idi-p/702110 . It has been In Review status fr a while - which means WD is already considering implementing it (which means it already garnered enough votes - but doesn’t hurt to still vote for it…I voted a long time ago myself.
If you find a solution I would love to hear it. So far I have simply left all the foldiers associated with (Public) empty because of this.
