Hacking the WD My Book Word Edition II (NAS)

Hi,

Here is some info on the WD My Book World Edition I got recently.

This device runs an ARMv5 chip at 200MHz. It has 32MB of ram, a gigabit port (a VIA chip) and dual SATA/300. WD locked down the maching quite thoroughly, but it can be opened and I did it. You need to move the drives to another linux machine, mount them as ext3 and uncomment inetd.com and remove passwords in shadow. This part needs care because of the raid setup.

Once you telnet (or ssh) to the device you can start up other services, NFS, sftp, tftp etc... They are all installed, just not started. It even has gcc installed which is handy.

I can give more info if interested.

Read your post and would like more info, dont know a lot about Linux but do have access to a box. are you mounting both drives at once, and the additional services you are talking about could you expalin a little further. once you take out the passwords in shadow how does that affect SAMBA? Like I said, I guess I have a few questions.

Thanks for any further info.

Originally Posted by bldrman

once you take out the passwords in shadow how does that affect SAMBA?

I don't have the device in question, but in general Samba stores its passwords independently of the shadow file. I would be inclined to believe it does so here, too.

With the way the WD people set things up, the samba username is copied to /etc/passwd and shadow, but the user's directory is not created. My guess is that they plan(ned) to add nfs later and were just preparing.

Hi,
you said, you need to take care about the Raid 1 setup. In which way? Do I need to do the changes on both drives?
Thanks

tgwena

QUOTE "I can give more info if interested"

I'm busy to do the same on my WD My Book World Edition I (500GB).

If possible please share your hints, tips and tricks with me.

NOTE: I'm currently busy to open the box and modify the telnet,ftp and ssh services by doing your first tip.

Originally Posted by tgwena

Hi,

Here is some info on the WD My Book World Edition I got recently.

This device runs an ARMv5 chip at 200MHz. It has 32MB of ram, a gigabit port (a VIA chip) and dual SATA/300. WD locked down the maching quite thoroughly, but it can be opened and I did it. You need to move the drives to another linux machine, mount them as ext3 and uncomment inetd.com and remove passwords in shadow. This part needs care because of the raid setup.

Once you telnet (or ssh) to the device you can start up other services, NFS, sftp, tftp etc... They are all installed, just not started. It even has gcc installed which is handy.

I can give more info if interested.

Hello,
I've got this NAS, and I'd like to start those daemons.
May I know your hints ?

Do you know if a DLNA function can be added on it ?

Thanks
Regards from Belgium.
Riric.

i too would like more details!!!
about to buy this over the weekend...

Hi,

I've got a WD My Book World Edition I (500GB) and I've started ssh, telnet, ...
Tgwena said nearly everything but here is some more detailed info :

First some hardware info :
Microcontroller : Oxford OXE800DSE (ARM 926 processor)
RAM : Samsung K4H561638H-ZC/LB3 (256MB DDR333 RAM !?)
VIA ship : ...


What you need :
- a PC with a SATA connector and a power SATA cable.
- a linux distrib installed on it

1/ First step :
- Dismount the case and extract the HDD (I can give more info for that step)
- Connect the HDD to your PC.

2/ There is 4 partition on the HDD :
The first one for the linux OS, the second one for the swap, the third one for "/usr" (I'm not sure of that) and the forth one for the data.
You need to mount the first partition (for example : sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /media/wd1).
cd to /media/wd1/etc/

3/ In that directory you will find the files "shadow" and "inetd.conf".
- Backup these files.
- Edit the "shadow" file (with "su" right) and remove the root password (2nd field).
The first line should now look like this "root::10933:0:99999:7:::"
- Edit the "inetd.conf" file (with "su" right) and remove all the '#'.

That's all you need to do !

4/ Remount the case and connect it to your network.

5/ Now you can access to your WD book via ssh.
Linux command line : (for example) "ssh -l user1 192.168.0.2"
(For ms windows, use Putty)
Note: "user1" is a user you have created with the WD web management interface.
Now, you can do everything you want...

Notes:
- You should set a new password for root and edit "sudoers" to add the sudo command for user1.
- The web server is lightTPD / I'm currently trying to add php5 support (I'm compiling php5 with fastcgi)
- The home directories for the users are not created. If you want to add them :
>cd /home
>su
>mkdir user1
>chown user1 user1
>chgrp user1 user1
>exit
- You can add more tools (try the bittorent client BitFlu which is in perl)...


Regards from France
PS: I hope my english is not too bad...

first hello to all & big thanks for the great tutorial saian.

@saian: plz post more details how to add php/apache on the mybook world when you got it ... thx for the info for now

Thanks for opening the topic but yes I have a question.
Given that the WD World Edition II has two drives how do you move them to another machine and mount them?

Anyhelp would be great.

Interesting. I have yet to find a cheap NAS that would do NFS, but it seems I just did

Anyone mind making an iso of the boot partion so I can look around it on my DamnSmallLinux pc?

@huper: more info related to that topic you find here

http://websupport.wdc.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5535

best regards

@technologickill
Thanks man that helps alot!

@huper

You have to make sure you put both drives in your linux box.

Also, you need the mdadm package installed. On Ubuntu Feisty, I had to 'sudo apt-get install mdadm'.

When you shut down and plug the two drives into the system and start up, mdadm will automatically see the drives. You then have to use /dev/md1 to access the / partition and /dev/md3 to access the /var partition.

But most importantly, you must use both drives and access them through their md interfaces, otherwise you will corrupt the drives.

Luckily WD posts the code for the OS, so I could recover, but it is easy to destroy your system.

Originally Posted by tgwena

Hi,
[snip]
You need to move the drives to another linux machine, mount them as ext3 and uncomment inetd.com and remove passwords in shadow. This part needs care because of the raid setup.
[snip]
I can give more info if interested.

Hi ... I am really interested to know if it is possible to uncomment inetd from ssh or if i absolutely have to move the drive to a linux machine. I have the 500Gb version. I have limited linux experience but using martin hinner's site I am in ssh but can't edit any files and cant seem to find a way to get files off the drive and back.

thanks guys

Sam

EDIT I:
I went back to basics and used vi (which I had never used before ) and have successfully edited the conf as described ... what does removing the shadow passwords do and what does it entail as I haven't done that yet since I am not sure exactly why and what will happen when I do.

Are there any steps I have to take to give myself full access as I don't seem to be able to navigate to the share folder from shell?

thanks again

My WB stop working, i must have done something wrong. Anyone can help me with the source files. I got them from WD website, but not sure what to do with it. I beleive it's a snapshop, but need more info on how to apply it to the World Book Edition II. I run Ubuntu.

I just need some info on how to "extract/apply" the snapshot to the HD?