Optimising MyBook World Edition

Summary

Since you came here, I guess you know what you are looking for. I am not going to explain more than that the MBWE is a NAS with some nice features and an excellent price/performance ratio and low power consumption.

Largely, this is a scratch pad for myself, but while I write this down, why not make it available to anybody. A lot of help and general ideas come from mybookworld wiki. (from now on simply called the wiki) and other places as well, so I do not claim to be the unique originator of everything written here. In fact, quite some of the read below expects you to familiarise yourself with the system, and while you do this, the wiki should be your favourite bookmark. But I think I did a combination of proper steps to get most out of my MBWE.

Everything written here is about Western Digital's MyBook World Edition in the so called White Light Version! You should be aware of differences in case you have one of the other systems, the older Blue Ring or now the newer Live.

Before you start!

Caution: As with all computer systems there is some risk when you change configurations manually. Especially with an embedded system like the MBWE, there is a higher chance a critical mistake may render your system unaccessible due to absence of a terminal! Break the network configuration and you lock yourself out! There is some help in the wiki about this, and a rescue tool here, but trust me, you don't really want to do that! While I did all my best to describe proper ways, EVERYTHING YOU DO, YOU DO AT YOUR OWN RISK!

I expect you to be at least an intermediate *n*x user. I am NOT going to explain how to use an editor or the basics of shell scripting. man is your friend. If you don't understand this last sentence, please go away!

Firmware version

Generally you should use the newest available firmware, but being no prophet, I cannot recommend to install any update as soon as it comes. Look in the Wiki for discussion on new fw. As of this writing we have 01.02.06. This runs stable on my box with all the changes and ideas you find on my website.

Backup your config!

You should create a copy of all files you may be going to change. This is more or less everything in the /etc and /root directories. Do something like:

cd /

path=/DataVolume/Public/system_

file=system`date +%y%m%d`.tar

mkdir -p $path

tar -cf "${path}/${file}" root etc

# gzip -9 "${path}/${file}"

I do this regularly in a script, so I can always recover to an earlier state. But save the original (first run, before you do any changes) somewhere safe, i.e. on another computer! I consider the knowledge of how to access this backup to be any good... intermediate... see above.

Step by step

If you read and understand (not neccessarily follow) every step in the menu to the left, you should be able to have a higher performing, still more silent and sleeping MBWE.