Western Digital 'MyCloud' Is Down 5 Days and Counting

Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "A friend of mine bought a Western Digital 'MyCloud' NAS server (non-RAID) a couple of weeks ago. WD implements the cloud service through its wd2go.com site. He reports that that site is down and has been since last Wednesday. No word on when it'll be back up. The only official announcements are daily repeats of this canned posting: 'Our My Cloud and My Book Live users are experiencing intermittent issues with WD servers that enable remote access when using these products. These issues include poor transfer speeds and/or inability to connect remotely. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience and will provide updates as they are available.'"

Comments

apr 1

[spune]

Can't tell if they're trying to pull my leg.

Re:apr 1

[MrBigInThePants]

If it is it would be a libel joke.

Or maybe the joke is on the shareholders?

Happy New Year Pagans!

[Anonymous Coward]

And may the fool be with you!

When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

P.S. in my case the service dropping authentication was not a joke, but perhaps some real discussion can come out of the hopeless noise that is April Fools day.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[nyctopterus]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

That's a good point, I'll make sure to ask if they have any specific assurances this is not going to happen again.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Todd Knarr]

That's pretty much unthinkable these days.

No, it's pretty much routine these days, just like it has been for the last... well, 34 years that I've been dealing with computers personally. Management doesn't see any reason to spend the (to be honest, fairly large chunks of) money to do a truly bullet-proof deployment that can tolerate things going pear-shaped without loss or interruption of service, because the salesman who sold them the tech swore on his mother's grave that it was bullet-proof and you didn't need to worry (his mother's still alive and running a three-card Monte scam in the Bronx, BTW). Murphy, being Murphy, puts his two cents in, and deployments go pear-shaped. And the users get to suffer for it.

Of course, I wouldn't buy WD's service anyway. Residential Internet's not suited for heavy upload, which is what you'll be doing fetching files from your drive at home, and that's on top of having to depend on a cloud service run by a company that's not a heavy-duty cloud service provider. Instead I'd buy a NAS box for the local network that doesn't depend on someone else's servers, and use Dropbox or Google Drive or the like for cloud storage. I'd also consider the cloud storage ephemeral and never ever put 100% trust in it, if I really have to have the data available then it goes on CD/DVD or thumb drive or a laptop's hard drive. Trust not in someone else's servers, for you can do nothing about any problems on their end and you are not a large enough chunk of their business that you can force them to jump when you say "Frog.".

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[RabidReindeer]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

Banking and computers go almost all the way back to the beginning. Probably only the military, scientific and insurance industries can claim as much. As a result, there are a multitude of banking software packages and service vendors with long histories to choose from.

But just as there are banks that aren't competent with their investments, there are banks which are incompetent with their IT.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[hcs_$reboot]

WD ordered some parts to be replaced a few weeks ago, parts coming from Malaysia. The aircraft suffered some delay but everything is under control.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Threni]

Not unthinkable in the UK. Google "uk banks glitch" for the least year or so. I think it's largely believed to be related to the use of unskilled developers. Cheap, though. Well, in the short term; until you lose customers.

Would I leave a bank/service if I were personally inconvenienced? Absolutely. Not to `send a message` because the companies don't listen to `messages`. But to not be inconvenienced again.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[FireFury03]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.

However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.

I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.

WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[sjwt]

4 days, sounds like a long enough time for heads to roll, you might find less issues with your bank in the future, though I would be enquiring as to what actions they have taken over this.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage).

While I agree with you about the inconvenience of changing banking institutions, I think it is unacceptable these days for a production outage to last more than 30 minutes. If a new or upgraded system is rolled out and it fails, then the ability to restore the previous system cannot be overstated. Besides final testing of the new system should be completed immediately after the upgrade and off-hours.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[u38cg]

The issue with the UK banks is aging IT infrastructure, an aging/retiring skills base and the enormous expense of transitioning to something future-proof.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some poor taste joke you made there - have a little respect.

If lives were not involved then fair enough, but to joke about 230+ people probably dying takes a complete asshole.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[scarboni888]

People die every day. If you can't laugh about that then what CAN you laugh about?

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[parkinglot777]

I would not make a hasten decision to change the bank but rather consider other things else with them, such as how well their services, how well and fast for their customer service, how secure (in my sense) and ease of use for their web site (if I use online service), etc. If I am still satisfied with their services, I would rather not change the bank.

The reason I would not simply jump from a bank to another because I may not know what the other bank I am going to switch to would have the similar issue in the future. It could be Murphy laws situation that I run away from a bank that has this issue to another bank that has the similar issue again. Besides, this bank have had the issue already, so they should have already known how to fix it faster next time.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[drolli]

Depends if they have "Availability" on their list of promises.

Availability is the thing which is most expensive to achieve. "Free service added to a consumer product where probably already every cent of cost has been shaved off before and which is probably not used to its full extend by a major fraction of users" usually does not go well with availability.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most residential Internet's are not suited for heavy upload

Fixed that. Mine is just fine. A dedicated symmetrical connection works quite well for uploading, yes, it's residential and I do pay less than FIOS. My PFSense box is around 12% cpu load when NATing 2gb/s(1gb up+down). I'm sure it'll handle 100mb Internet connection. Verizon is residential FIOS expensive, that's good I have dedicated fiber to my ISP who uses Level 3. Congestion never happens.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[AmiMoJo]

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

On the other hand maybe they discovered a serious security issue and did the responsible thing while properly fixing it. A lot of banks just seem to ignore security issues.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Kjella]

If it was an unexpected system failure, I might have had more sympathy. Bugs happen despite your best efforts and pinning down the source of the problem and rushing a patch or workaround through the system takes a little while. You can't really guard against the unknown unknowns. That an upgrade might fail though that's a known unknown, you don't know why but you should assume that it may and have a plan to roll back to the working version. Particularly something as stateless as the authentication system, assuming that's what actually failed and they didn't just take it down to fix something else. I mean it's like having two doors to the building and discovering that your new door jams, bar it shut and reopen the old one. I'd probably take my business elsewhere, online banking is a commodity these days and the self-service is much the same everywhere.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[AmiMoJo]

The thing is they should have redundancy built into the system. They must have vast storage networks and then a load of front-end infrastructure to handle access to it. That means hundreds, probably thousands of individual servers. Their system should not be vulnerable to the failure of a few of them.

In fact I'd guess that they don't even run the storage themselves, they probably farm it out to someone like Amazon and then just manage the front end stuff.

This smacks of incompetence. They aren't even bothering to blame anyone else like their connectivity provider. They must have screwed up massively somehow and are now struggling to fix the situation. I just hope they have not lost any data...

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

then what CAN you laugh about?

Ummm... Carrot Top? Your penis? Mimes? Cat videos?

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a good point, I'll make sure to ask if they have any specific assurances this is not going to happen again.

Ha ha. TD Ameritrade took money out of my brokerage account because their internal auditing guys decided they should. No justification, and they admitted it (then put the money back and then took it out a second time). Straight up violation of FINRA regulations. When I asked for assurances that it couldn't happen again, all they could say was "but they thought they needed to take that money out of your account without your permission."

No way will any financial institution ever make you a binding commitment to have working IT systems, let alone committ to protect your money. That's why we have FDIC and FINRA insurance.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[cdrudge]

And no company can assure you that it won't happen again. It's not as if they planned for it to break. They did something (or depending on the circumstances, didn't do something) and it broke. They can assure you that they are gong to try for it not to happen again. Or take steps for better testing, implementation, or quickly fall back should a snafu happen again. But they can't say that it won't happen again.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[_xeno_]

Instead I'd buy a NAS box for the local network that doesn't depend on someone else's servers

Which, incidentally, is essentially what MyCloud is. I have a Western Digital MyCloud sitting at home and I never even noticed the outage. If you don't bother trying to access it from outside your home network, it's basically just a little NAS device.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[RabidReindeer]

Ignoring security issues isn't something fundamentally different than ignoring technical ones. Chances are, if you're cheap/sloppy in one place, you're cheap and sloppy in others as well.

And when the lid blows off, people are going to run around and scream and you'll be more or less out of business for an extended period of time.

I think we can safely rule out the fault being wholly external. Otherwise more banks than this one would have gone offline and we'd have heard it on the news.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Voyager529]

Instead I'd buy a NAS box for the local network that doesn't depend on someone else's servers

Which, incidentally, is essentially what MyCloud is. I have a Western Digital MyCloud sitting at home and I never even noticed the outage. If you don't bother trying to access it from outside your home network, it's basically just a little NAS device.

I came here to reiterate basically this. The MyCloud devices do use WD services, but essentially what Western Digital does is perform relay services and dynamic DNS, for users who don't know how to do port forwarding and NAT translation (and/or have outbound port 80 blocked on their residential line) but still want a pretty app on their iPhone. Samba/CIFS still works perfectly on a LAN despite the outage. It's also entirely possible to use the MyCloud device if you are willing to use FTP/SSH when out and about, or with a little command line magic, get BitTorrent Sync up and running on those drives - it takes less than ten minutes of cutting and pasting into Putty.

Even if the WD services never come back, the only thing that is gone is the convenience factor. Now to be fair, that's a huge selling point of these drives that makes them more expensive than equal-capacity USB volumes. I understand the frustration of building a workflow around a feature set prominently displayed on the box, and I'm not saying that Western Digital doesn't have a responsibility to get their act together. At the same time, the fact that there are very time tested methods of accessing the data without the service, so it's a very different scenario than, say, Dropbox going down for a week or Google deciding to throw in the towel with Google Drive.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

Just to let you know, I found that dark but funny.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also entirely possible to use the MyCloud device if you are willing to use FTP/SSH when out and about, or with a little command line magic

FTP and SSH won't connect for me. Just hangs.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[DrGamez]

I am not sure if ACs like you exist solely to create a "whoosh" sound.

Between having to "out-car-analogy" each other, and just complete "not getting the joke" comments, I'd a bit amazed Slashdot is looked at as a place of intelligent discussion most days :(

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Around 150000 people die daily. Boo-fucking-hoo. Get over yourself.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Voyager529]

It's also entirely possible to use the MyCloud device if you are willing to use FTP/SSH when out and about, or with a little command line magic

FTP and SSH won't connect for me. Just hangs.

Sorry for the dumb question, but are you certain that FTP and/or SSH is enabled in the WebUI? I don't recall if FTP is enabled by default, but I know for a fact that SSH is disabled unless explicitly enabled.

If so, go to Western Digital's website as I know they've had a few firmware updates for the drives in recent history. Try running those firmware upgrades if you can and see if it solves your problem.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[mgcarley]

You're either on Google Fiber, one of those municipal fiber projects or not in the USA... which is it? Because I would be very much interested.

Pity you posted as AC.

HDD != Cloud

[Pieroxy]

Choose your vendor carefully. HDD manufacturers are probably not good at cloud services, just because it's not their core business, nor is it close to their core business. I could've told you that. You want cloud storage? Go DropBox, Amazon, Google. These guys know what they're doing.

Now, don't treat this storage as safe or secure. It's cloud storage. Safe is copied over to at least two different remote locations plus at least two local storage devices. Secure is encrypted and offline. Cloud is neither, but it is convenient.

The key here is to know what you are doing, which isn't always obvious.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Frobnicator]

Choose your vendor carefully. HDD manufacturers are probably not good at cloud services.

You obviously don't know what the MyCloud service is.

Basically it does the same job of Dynamic DNS and NAT traversal, but just for your network drive. You attach your drive to your home network --- up to 4TB in size --- provide a username and password, and you're done. You log in to their wd2go site and have full access to your 4TB drive. It saves the hassle of trying to fight constantly rolling IP addresses, trying to open ports and map them to devices, and do all the other technical stuff.

Hence the name. "My Cloud". Not "Google's Cloud", or "Amazon's Cloud" or "Drop Box's Cloud", it is a cheap and easy way to get your mass storage online.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Big Hairy Ian]

it is a cheap and easy way to get your mass storage online.

Or off-line as it is at the moment

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you don't know how marketing works.

It's In The Cloud. Therefore, since it is In The Cloud, it is at once, Secure, Reliable and Available.

This is how marketing terms work. And WD's MyCloud is exactly that--marketing. Stop making apologies for them.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

And as an added bonus, now WD knows every single filename that you access from your own storage. Well, they would if it was working.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[stooo]

Why only filename ? they seem to have no encryption whatsoever....

Gruss

Re:HDD != Cloud

[BlueTrin]

it is a cheap and easy way to get your mass storage online.

Or off-line as it is at the moment

It does not work that way: it is either a cheap and easy way to get your stuff online or an expensive and clunky way to get your stuff offline (or nowhere)

Re:HDD != Cloud

[N1AK]

Stop making apologies for them.

He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

What's more, unless you want to access it via a web browser, you don't need to use the WD web site at all.

See this article for details.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Pieroxy]

If you want me to restate my previous comment, here it is: The point is, HD manufacturers probably suck at networking.

There. It's down, proving my point at this very moment.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[war4peace]

Well, WD fucked me in the ass once with the MyBook external 4 TB drive. I bought one (and paid heftily for it) only to run into endless issues with eSATA randomly disconnecting for no apparent reason. Turns out that there's an "incompatibility" between their rather strange eSATA controller and Marvell onboard mobo controller, which was known by WD but never mentioned in the product description or on the box, let alone while purchasing the device.

I had to dig the issue up in their KB and when I asked them about it, they said "tough luck, use another mobo controller".

So I had to pull out the HDDs and buy two eSATA enclosures, which basically means I paid 60 extra bucks on stuff I shouldn't have bought at all, let alone the price difference between two 2TB bare drives and the fancy myBook enclosure (which was about 200 bucks as well).

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm return it?

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Cederic]

Or you could buy their (cheap, reliable, effective) NAS devices and use your own Dynamic DNS and SSH to provide cloud-based file storage without relying on the Western Digital cloud service.

WD make good hard disks, and their MyBook Duo is a perfectly capable home NAS device, and it's bloody cheap. That doesn't mean that they're good at cloud services, redirection to your home network or otherwise.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy cow! Why would anyone give any company access and credentials to theier personal storage? Because...cloud?

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Zero__Kelvin]

So in your mind they took some firmware engineer off his latest project and told him to go implement the mycloud service? You don't see it as distinctly possible that they created new postiions and hired competent people to fill them (and yes, trouble like this can be encountered even by highly competent people.)

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Pieroxy]

Of course, they did hire new people. But tell me, how many hardware companies do you know that produces high quality software and/or services?

Well, there is one: Apple. And this is IMO the key to their success. They do both well (whether or not you agree with their policies/strategy is another matter, both their software and their hardware are top-class in their respective fields, and nobody even questions that.)

The rest of them? All hardware manufacturers I can think of makes software that sucks big time (graphics, printers, scanners, all those devices - and their drivers - come to mind)

So is it possible for WD to do a good service online? Of course it is. But in my view, it's extremely unlikely.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[war4peace]

Returning it was... complicated. It was a corporate.acquired device, through a corporate buyer, with lots of paperwork and waiting time involved. And I really needed it for back-up.

DynDNS and a real NAS

[SeaFox]

Cut out the middleman and no downtime from corporate ineptitude.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Frobnicator]

Cut out the middleman and no downtime from corporate ineptitude.

Great. Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

The point of these devices is that a lay person can plug it in to their home network, put in a username and password, then access their 4TB drive anywhere on the world.

I've got one, I've got a 2TB collection of data that I regularly syphon files from when I am traveling. It is easy and works great, I don't need to leave a PC running (draining my wallet through the power company) to access all the data since it is a low-power device. It is as fast as my internet speed and costs nothing for the service.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[TheRaven64]

You might be surprised. If you've set up your own router using an off-the-shelf open source OS, then doing DynDNS-type things can be a bit complicated. A lot of cheap consumer routers, however, support it out of the box - you just provide it with your credentials and it works. Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface. It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd argue technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbours don't have stuff to do moving high volume data in/out their private cloud, because since they are illiterate they care nothing about privacy (they are part of the majority who thinks NSA is doing well spying on us), or maybe don't even have a "PC", so their iPhone/Android does fine sharing over iCloud/Google drive.

I'm with you that if you have a fast network you can set up a device easily (eg. Airport/Time machine for mac backups/file sharing, unless you also claim your illiterate people know how to install Linux on a preinstalled machine with either Windows or MacOSX), but please stop pulling out of your ass impossible requirements to meet.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[wonkey_monkey]

Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface.

Pointy-clicky-typey last time I checked. And it requires knowing your IP address - most tech illiterates probably couldn't even tell you their machine's name, let alone
it's IP address (which would be usually set by DHCP and therefore liable - thought not likely - to change).

It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).

And implementing the web-based TLS-using file server? I'd certainly never recommend putting your own out there on the internet over using a third party's service and letting them deal with the security hassles (assuming they can do so without a week's downtime, of course).

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

A relatively recent problem is that there aren't any good free DynDNS providers left. They've all gone for-pay or become annoying (solve a captcha per month or lose your DNS name).

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

If they're technically illiterate, perhaps they should address that before attempting technical things?

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[SeaFox]

Pointy-clicky-typey last time I checked. And it requires knowing your IP address - most tech illiterates probably couldn't even tell you their machine's name, let alone it's IP address (which would be usually set by DHCP and therefore liable - thought not likely - to change).

You check a PC's IP address to figure out the IP numbering scheme in use. Most consumer routers have no issue with a single device setting it's own IP address on the network -- provided it's not trying to use one already handed out by the DHCP server. I have to talk people through setting up port forwarding for cellular microcells quite often. I generally have them use the LAN IP .200 or above in the port forward setting to put it far beyond what will realistically get used by the router handing out addresses. Then their wireless carrier has to talk them through setting up a static LAN address on the microcell with the IP, SN, and DG I've provided to the customer.

Joe Sixpack just did port forwarding.
And he could have probably done it himself if he'd just RTFM.

And implementing the web-based TLS-using file server? I'd certainly never recommend putting your own out there on the internet over using a third party's service and letting them deal with the security hassles (assuming they can do so without a week's downtime, of course).

Judging by the frequency of articles on Slashdot about the turnkey "internet of things" getting hacked, it doesn't look like they're taking security seriously, either.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

The people who are not able to setup or understand this technology should not use it. In the end they will ask their personal geek to do the installation anyway and then he is the one to blame if it does not work.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[SeaFox]

Great. Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

The point of these devices is that a lay person can plug it in to their home network, put in a username and password, then access their 4TB drive anywhere on the world.

I'd suggest that people that technically inept probably don't need 24/7 around-the-world access to those files on their own internet connected storage system. Four terabytes? What would be making up all these gigs that they need to be able to get this easily all the time. Whatever files they need access to that way they could probably fit on a thumb drive -- they wouldn't even have to worry about an Internet provider working properly then. And even if this is a cloud-access-is-a-must issue, Dropbox or a dozen other service providers could fill in just as well with something run in a professional hosting environment.

The kind of people you're talking about leave their broadband modems on the floor under desks for months with static electricity and dust. They mount equipment in cabinets with no ventilation (and no access at all when something stops working sometimes), and bypass the Windows scandisk when it triggers itself (because it takes so long~). Do these sound like folks who should be hosting their own servers?

I feel if you want to host your own node on the Net, you learn how. And if you don't want to learn how, you let someone else host it. A half-assed "I bought this but can't even tell what plugs go where unless I call support" solution isn't doing you any favors.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.noip.com/managed-dns gives 3 free hostnames.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[BlueTrin]

Well pictures ? Videos ? Many people are technically illiterate but like to use tech gadgets which can generate huge amount of data. Your reply is 1337ist and pointless.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors

how to implement DynDNS,

How to configure DynDNS

how to poke holes in their firewall,

How to Port Forward/Open Ports on a Wireless Router

and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

IIS 7/7.5 Hardening SSL TLS

Dude, it's the INTERNET! There are bazillions of "How To" resources out there for every level of technical expertise.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about the quality of D_LINK in general, but my cheapo router came with free dynamic DNS (dlinkddns.com). That seems quite reliable.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Richard_at_work]

As if DynDNS has never had any downtime...

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Those you're disparaging are most likely to be generating tones of media. Unlike sanctimonious dicks like you, those not interested in tech for the sake of it are actually more productive. So how about you fucking off with your high horse?

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

Or you just set it up for them. As long as your family isn't mormon sized, it's not exactly a full time job.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Bengie]

My last consumer grade router's port forwarding UI gave a list of devices. If you selected to forward a port range to that device, it would add an entry to the "Advanced" page that used the MAC address. The advanced page let either MAC or IP address be used for port forwarding. The MAC was used for DHCP reasons, so it could auto-populate the forwarding rule to that device in case the DHCP lease changed the IP.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but it comes at the cost of using D-Link hardware. (D-Link's DDNS is provided by DynDNS.com, which used to be free but isn't anymore.)

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

...which expire every 30 days unless you keep renewing them by solving a captcha per month.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[cdrudge]

Then don't use DynDNS's service. Use any one or multiple of the many 3rd party dynamic DNS services. Or use your registrar if they have such a feature. I use Namecheap for instance. I need a registrar. I need a DNS server. Might as well eliminate one extra failure point or add one extra point of redundancy depending on your setup.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[jittles]

I've got one, I've got a 2TB collection of data that I regularly syphon files from when I am traveling. It is easy and works great, I don't need to leave a PC running (draining my wallet through the power company) to access all the data since it is a low-power device. It is as fast as my internet speed and costs nothing for the service.

I built a fanless Core i3 Ivy Bridge machine that, according to my Kill-A-Watt, uses about 10W unless its really cranking out some computations for me. It runs an L2TP over IPSec VPN server that allows me to remotely connect to my machine from any device, including my iPad or phone. I have a virtual machine that runs a linux file server on it, and one that runs a windows host for RDP. I was originally running all of this on one of the original Atom boards but I found myself in need of upgrading.

The overall cost of building the computer from scratch was around $400 (Motherboard, CPU, RAM). I repurposed an existing SSD for its boot drive (Intel drive that uses 0.125W), and then a 1TB mechanical drive for storage. My off-the-top-of-my-head calculations put my electricity cost at about $11 a year.

I use ZoneEdit for DNS services and my router automatically updates the IP address the moment that it changes. My ISP changes my IP address about once or twice a year. I spend about 2 hours a year on security updates and other system maintenance.

Why did I set up a system like this with RDP capabilities? I used to spend a lot of time in hotels and I do not trust hotel WiFi. I'd also travel internationally and could not always access the services I wanted to access remotely. I sometimes used the VPN connection to buy products at a better fair (did you know that British Rail gives you a better price on train tickets if you purchase from the US instead of the UK?). Most of all, I have a secure network with which I can do all of my online banking, emailing, and bill-paying while on the road. I maintain a similar box at my parents that I use to remotely administer and repair their computers from across the world (assuming they can boot them). Totally worth it to have a real machine, IMHO.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Cederic]

The MyBook Live Duo using 9W and I can buy one pre-built with 4TB of storage for $432.

It's not as powerful as an i3 (any i3) but it's a fully functional linux box and perfectly adequate as file server.

When something is cheaper than home-brew, comes prebuilt, has the configuration/setup software pre-installed (including user, quota and access management via web UI) and just sits there working properly, I'm happy.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

those not interested in tech for the sake of it are actually more productive

Based on what? My guess would be the opposite, that those interested in their work are more productive than those who just do it for the money.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all in what you need, bro. If that works for you, that's great. Everybody's uses are different. Mine, as an example, differ from yours. I built a low end i3 box for about 300 if I recall and threw in two 3TB WD Reds, so overall I had a 570-ish dollar box. While I do run ownCloud, and swear by it a thousand times over any other sort of "cloud" service for a multitude of reasons, I also do many other things with it, such as video surveillance, file, print, backup, web, etc. All of this may be do-able from a prepackaged device such as the WD Cloud gizmo, but I sincerely doubt it given that the video surveillance portion would likely cause a WD Cloud CPU to get pegged pretty high, or flat out drop frames during the feed.

Given what I do on my server and what power it consumes, I'm beyond happy with it, but I do understand the bonus of just having something that plain works. I recall Linus Torvalds wanting a NAS box and talking about it on G+, but from the get-go said he just wanted it to work and didn't want to bother with setting up any shares, services, or anything like that.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[SeaFox]

They send you an email with a link to take you right to the captcha page, you don't even have to remember or set reminders on your calendar app.

I seem to remember it's like $15 a YEAR with the discount they offer on those email renewals notices. If you can't be bothered to visit a site for less than three minutes once a month, you should just pay the fee.

whats the surprise again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure it works as well as the velociraptor did in the server market elsewhere.

Re:whats the surprise again?

[blane.bramble]

You need to bring the power back online so you can close the door locks to the server room and prevent the velociraptors from getting it. They may have worked out how to use door handles by now.

Re:whats the surprise again?

[gmhowell]

I hate this hacker crap.

Re:whats the surprise again?

[twdorris]

I hate this hacker crap.

But I'm loving this 3D Linux file system manager!

Re:whats the surprise again?

[Anonymous Coward]

gmhowell are you capable of scrawling more than 1 sentence or is that a struggle for you?

I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[bazmail]

So customers ability to access their bought-and-paid-for hard drive depends on WD's ability to keep their servers up?


What is so "cloud" about this setup anyway? It just seems like weapons-grade incompetence in design and implementation. I'll be avoiding WD

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

Except statistics have shown, especially with WD acquiring Hitachi, WD makes the best hard drives. Your only other option is Seagate, and those same recently published stats show you better now.

Now you may have a point about their consumer cloud DNS traversal services (i.e. keeping their own cloud up), but they kinda own the HD market right now.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

to better clarify what I wrote and am replying to, stats say you better not buy Seagate drives.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[gl4ss]

yes, if you want to use their gateway proxy servers to access your paid for harddisk then yeah it depends on them.. but on the other hand, part of the money paid for the drive also goes towards keeping those running.

i think if these are like mybooks you can access them from the lan just fine..

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stats say that all drives will eventually fail!

Don't buy a hard drive at all!

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

WD did not buy Hitachi's 3.5 inch fab, that went straight to Toshiba.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

This is good nerdy news to know! I googled futher, and attached citations. Thanks!

"Tom's Hardware" writes they had to sell off a lot of their facitiies:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Western Digital's hopes of turning the hard drive industry into a duopoly have been dashed as the US Federal Trade Commission demands it sells its desktop hard drive manufacturing facilities to a competitor.

Western Digital had previously hoped to purchase Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, manufacturer of previously IBM-made hard drives, in a deal valued at $4.5 billion. While the FTC is allowing the deal to go ahead, it has a major caveat attached.

The revised terms of the acquisition require Western Digital to sell selected Hitachi desktop hard drive-related sales and manufacturing assets to rival Toshiba within 15 days of the acquisition.

Dutch language review follows. I had to copy paste into Google Translate but this person gives the drives a thumbs up at review-time, and wrote if it failed they'd update the review, which hasn't happened. And they wrote specifically with 'green' NAS requirements.
https://tweakers.net/productre...

Now, how to tell if their 3Tb drive is from the former Hitachi Fab?

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[AmiMoJo]

Hitachi are still the best. Even though they are owned by WD they still have separate manufacturing and R&D divisions. WD are pretty good, but Hitachi are still the kings of reliability.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is.
DT01ACA300 == Hitachi HDS723030BLE640
DT01ABA300 == Hitachi HDS5C3030BLE630
Toshiba Store.E externals contain ABA series drives.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

Thank you AC. And, I never ever thought I'd write that.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[DewDude]

Well, it's a matter of convenience. The average user is not going to know how to access their data without having it done for them; and they've already been willing to pay extra for convenience. So, yes; if you can't do it yourself, you have to depend on someone else. Those of us who know how to access our drives remotely; either over SSHd or tunneling NFS or SMB take this mentality....but we're already not going to pay for a service we can set up ourselves? Would I buy a WD MyCloud drive? Hell no! I'll buy a standard hard drive, plug it in to my Linux box and access it over VPN like a real man.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[Voyager529]

So customers ability to access their bought-and-paid-for hard drive depends on WD's ability to keep their servers up?

Not exactly. Think of it this way: Western Digital handles NAT traversal and Dynamic DNS. The bright side is that buyers don't have to mess with their routers to make the drive work and then sign up for DynDNS or somesuch in order to remotely access it. For a LOT of non-Slashdotters, this is a good thing.

Naturally, this also means that once the service that streamlines that process goes down, people's remote access to their data goes down. Think of it like having Filezilla Server installed on your desktop with port 21 forwarded/translated to it from your router. Then, while you're out, someone at home factory resets the router and loses your config. Same principle.

What is so "cloud" about this setup anyway? It just seems like weapons-grade incompetence in design and implementation. I'll be avoiding WD

The "Cloud" part is the "always on, available everywhere" part of the equation, complete with a mobile app. the "My" part is that your data still lives at your house, on your hardware, and Western Digital doesn't have access to it. The drive is marketed this way because its ability to do Samba, FTP, and SSH (and the fact that it runs a small Linux stack so you can run rsync and BT Sync with some command line magic) out of the box just fine without ever signing up for Western Digital services doesn't exactly scream "Buy Me!!!!111" to most consumers. Think of it like a pre-assembled, single-drive FreeNAS that doesn't support iSCSI or NFS and uses EXT4 (I think), that also has a "hold my hand mode" for people who are confused about things like "file systems" and "not getting software through an app market of some kind".

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[arth1]

Hitachi are still the best. Even though they are owned by WD they still have separate manufacturing and R&D divisions. WD are pretty good, but Hitachi are still the kings of reliability.

Given your relatively low ID, I wonder how you managed to miss the whole Hitachi Deathstar experience?

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[tfranzese]

Probably because there was no Hitachi Deathstar experience. He might recall the IBM Deskstar failures (75GXP), but that occurred years before they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[arth1]

No, the problems continued for quite a while after the transition to Hitachi, with the 128GXP and 180GXP models. They weren't AS bad as the 75GXP, but they still had a rather bad failure rate.
These days, Seagate is the brand to avoid, though.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[Jack Griffin]

No. Had you RTFA, or even some of the comments above you would know that.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[buysse]

> Hitachi Deathstar

Jebus, dude. That was almost 15 years ago. If you're looking back that far at a company (that's not a startup), you'll find some mistake, some bad product. People don't talk about the Pinto anymore when you mention Ford.

Let it go, man.

USA company

[Anonymous Coward]

What else do you expect? It aint a chinese company

So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If product is 'My' cloud, why is your failure causing me these issues?

BurstNET?

[jrumney]

They wouldn't happen to host their servers on BurstNET would they? Apparently they are in some sort of dispute with their landlord and suddenly decided to ship a datacenter full of racked servers from Pennsylvania to North Carolina over the last week, with the corresponding problems that comes from a poorly planned rushed move.

Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

My Seagate NAS (Central) has the same sort of internet-wide file sharing option, but enabling that seems like a huge security risk. It turns out the NAS runs Linux which is nice because you can turn the NAS into a low-power home server, but if you look under the hood, the vendor customizations do not inspire confidence at all. There is no way I would expose my data by letting the NAS connect to a vendor server. I'm guessing hackers will be all over "personal cloud" services like MyCloud.

And you obviously don' t know about portable HDs

[Viol8]

Or USB sticks. Guess what - they fit in your pocket and you don't need internet access or some shoddy "cloud" service to access your data which you have to leave connected 24/7. Oh , but it password protected so it must be safe.

In the cloud

[MrKaos]

It never rains but it pours.

Western Digital MyButt

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine bought a Western Digital 'MyButt' NAS server (non-RAID) a couple of weeks ago. WD implements my butt servicing through its wd2go.com site. He reports that that site is down and has been since last Wednesday. No word on when it'll be back up. The only official announcements are daily repeats of this canned posting: 'Our My Butt and The Moon users are experiencing intermittent issues with WD servers that enable remote access when using these products. These issues include poor transfer speeds and/or inability to connect to their butt remotely. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience and will provide updates as they are available.'"

https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

What real tech illiterates are like

[sjbe]

If you've set up your own router using an off-the-shelf open source OS, then doing DynDNS-type things can be a bit complicated. A lot of cheap consumer routers, however, support it out of the box - you just provide it with your credentials and it works.

Setting up DynDNS is complicated period. Anyone who doesn't think it is complicated knows way too much about DNS to comprehend why it is complicated. Even explaining what DynDNS is to a lay-person tends to make their head explode. Hell, I can barely get my parents to understand how to use Dropbox which is WAY simpler than any open source stack some geek might set up.

Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface. It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do.

If you believe that then you have either A) never actually tried to coach a genuinely technologically illiterate person through this or B) you don't know any genuinely technologically illiterate persons or C) both. Port forwarding is seriously arcane stuff to 99.9% of the population. It requires a bunch of knowledge they do not possess, data they don't know how to get (like IP addresses), passwords they've probably forgotten if they ever knew them at all, etc.

@Threni - Re:When should you abandon a service?

[nukenerd]

.. Google "uk banks glitch" for the least year or so. ...Would I leave a bank/service if I were personally inconvenienced? Absolutely. Not to `send a message` because the companies don't listen to `messages`. But to not be inconvenienced again.

It's worse than inconvenience. Lloyds and TSB's systems went down last September (AFAIR) during their break-up. I went in the red as a result and they slapped a bank charge on me. I went into the Lloyds branch (Chepstow, UK), saw the manager, and his attitude was that I "should have kept an eye" on my account. Told him that interent banking IS the way I keep an eye on my account..

I did get my bank charge repaid eventually. But meanwhile I withdrew everything but 1GBP from all the savings accounts I had with them (my mother's as well - I have power of attorney) - a six digit figure all together. Idiots.

@Parkinglot -Re:When should you abandon a service?

[nukenerd]

I would not simply jump from a bank to another because .. the other bank [may] have the similar issue in the future.

I have four different bank accounts and can move money between them from this keyboard. I moved all but a token amount from one bank recently because they pissed me off.

Re:And you obviously don' t know about portable HD

[number17]

Truecrypt is my friend for any sensitive data stored on a portable device.

Are they getting DoSed?

[FilmedInNoir]

Has the Cloud war heated up to this level already?

Re:Are they getting DoSed?

[Gothmolly]

Begun, the Cloud War has?

Re:Are they getting DoSed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing the are FeDoS'ed
As in, the feds have them offline. Barring that, they're handing an intrusion and trying to do forensics.

Good thing...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I never enabled the wd2go option. I just use it as a local NAS appliance and use OpenVPN when I really need remote access to my backup images which is very rare.

If I need a remote cloud I use DropBox with their DMCA auto block feature. ;) All kidding aside, I never had a problem with DropBox. They are worth every penny I didn't spend.

my motto

[slashmydots]

At my shop, when people ask, I tell them to buy anything but Western Digital for hard drive products. You plug in one of their mybooks and it's recognized as a fake DVD drive. It's fake encrypted and protected by their fake and unbelievably annoying feature. That's the tip of the iceberg because not even their WD version of acronis works properly.

Bummer

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't like seeing any service down, even one I don't use, I do have to be 'that guy' for a moment and say... reasons like this, among countless others, are why I only trust one cloud; owncloud.

Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does anyone get the feeling that WDs 'Data Recovery Specialists' are working overtime?

Incidents like this will only become more common

[Just Brew It!]

When you let someone else manage your data, you no longer control your data. That's the biggest flaw with the current "race to the cloud".

It's not easy

[sjbe]

You check a PC's IP address to figure out the IP numbering scheme in use.

Great. My parents have no idea how to do this. Yes it sounds simple to you (and me) but it isn't. Hell, my wife who has a doctorate has no idea how to do this. You say what to do as if it is the most trivial thing in the world and the stream of your technobabble that follows proves you wrong. Non-geeks don't understand this stuff at all. Doesn't mean they are stupid, it means that it is arcane and needlessly complicated. People use services like dropbox because doing it yourself is a pain in the ass in most cases and provides them no additional benefit that they care about.

Joe Sixpack just did port forwarding.
And he could have probably done it himself if he'd just RTFM.

No he didn't unless you stood over his proverbial (or literal) shoulder telling him how. And no they couldn't/wouldn't do it themselves because they don't even know what the hell it is. You can't solve a problem if you don't even know what questions to ask. Just because you think it is easy doesn't mean it actually is easy for other people.

Did you drop them?

[SuperKendall]

That is a really interesting anecdote, and seems pretty awful - to go back to my original point, was that enough for you to drop them or did you just roll your eyes and move on?

Re:And you obviously don' t know about portable HD

[Jack Griffin]

But don't scale to 4TB...

significant progress restoring connections - Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Community Manager Bill_S Community Manager 58m ago
Re: NOTICE: WD2Go.com and WDMyCloud.com users in relay mode are reporting that connections...

We have made significant progress restoring connections to our My Cloud and My Book Live servers. We are in the process of validating connections for our entire user base. We recommend that if you are still experiencing connectivity issues to restart your My Book Live or My Cloud device. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/NOTICE-WD2Go-com-and-WDMyCloud-com-users-in-relay-mode-are/td-p/706066/page/27

I'm not surprised. Their product documentation loo

[vancedecker]

...in that the quality is 5hit poor, like a middle school project turned in at the last minute.

Here's an example:
It's the document for their "Universal Firmware Updater"
http://support.wdc.com/downloa...

Want to know what the firmware update does for your specific product. Good luck with that... maybe it's documented on some obscure forum somewhere, but Ain't Nobody Got Time for That!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

I won't even go into their moronic backup software, referred to, ambiguously, as SmartWare. So, the idea that they are competent to run a cloud based service is suspect at best. engineers should stick to engineering, and leave to internet to imagineers.

The bankers will be taken care of after the revolu

[vancedecker]

Do you have any other examples? We should only stick to people who know what they are doing. Kim has 'dotcom' as his last name! How can you go wrong?

I only use NSA approved encryption.

[vancedecker]

As long as I stay in America and don't piss anybody off with power or money, I'm golden.