TOPIC: PASSWD
Halting constant disk activity on a WD My Cloud NAS
6th June 2018Recently, I noticed that the disk in my WD My Cloud NAS was active all the time, so it reminded me of another time when this happened. Then, I needed to activate the SSH service on the device and log in as root with the password welc0me. That default password was changed before doing anything else. Since the device runs on Debian Linux, that was a simple case of using the passwd command and following the prompts. One word of caution is in order since only root can be used for SSH connections to a WD My Cloud NAS and any other user that you set up will not have these privileges.
The cause of all the activity was two services: wdmcserverd and wdphotodbmergerd. One way to halt their actions is to stop the services using these commands:
/etc/init.d/wdmcserverd stop
/etc/init.d/wdphotodbmergerd stop
The above act only works until the next system restart, so these command should make for a more persistent disabling of the culprits:
update-rc.d -f wdmcserverd remove
update-rc.d -f wdphotodbmergerd remove
If all else fails, removing executable privileges from the normally executable files that the services need will work, and it is a solution that I have tried successfully between system updates:
cd /etc/init.d
chmod 644 wdmcserverd
reboot
Between all of these, it should be possible to have you WD My Cloud NAS go into power saving mode as it should, even if turning off additional services such as DLNA may be what some need to do. Having turned off these already, I only needed to disable the photo thumbnail services that were the cause of my machine's troubles.