WD My Book World Edition NAS Device

Name: WD My Book World Edition NAS Device - Page 4
Brand: WD

by Daniel A. Begun — Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 10:30 AM EDT

Configuration options

Page 4: Configuration options

When you first launch the WD My Book World Edition's web-based interface, you are greeted with a login screen that gives you the choice of logging into the Network Storage Manager, Downloader, or Copy Manager. The Network Storage Manager is the primary interface module through which you can modify the device's settings. Once you log into the interface, you land on the Basic Mode overview page, which gives you basic options for settings such as the Device Name, Users, and Folder Shares (see the screenshot below). If you click on the Advanced Mode option, however, you are given far-more in-depth control over the device. We focused our attention on the Advanced Mode settings.

The device's Web-based login screen.

Basic Mode.

The Advanced Mode's System page.

The Advanced Mode breaks out the device's settings into different tabbed pages:

System
Network
Storage
Media
Users
Status

Alerts Setup screen.

The Advanced settings screen.

The System page provides access to settings where you can do things such as change the device name, enable system alerts, set the Admin password, check for and install firmware updates, save and restore the device's configuration settings, enable SSH access, enable standby mode, turn the LED status lights on or off, and shutdown or reboot the device. With the exception of setting up SSH access and the system alerts, most of the settings are self-explanatory. For SSH access, you cannot change the password from its default setting, but the interface does have the ability to automatically generate a new SSL certificate and key pair. After a little experimentation we were able to get the e-mail notification alerts working, but we never could get the pop-up notifications to work on our test systems. The e-mail alerts are simple text-based messages that inform you when certain events happen such as an abnormal shutdown or a device reboot.

The Network settings page.

The LAN settings screen.

The Network page lets you set the device's DHCP or static IP settings; set the workgroup or domain name settings; enable UPnP; set the drive's HTTP and HTTPS ports; and enable FTP, NFS, and AFP protocol access. The Network page is also where you can enable remote access to the WD My Book World Edition using WD's MioNet service.

The Storage settings page.

Setting user Quotas.

The Storage page is a bit of a hodge-podge of different settings. Perhaps the most important setting of this page is the ability to create and manage private folder shares, including setting independent share-level access for CIFS, FTP, NFS, and AFP protocol access. If you attach a USB drive to the WD My Book World Edition's USB port, you can also format the USB drive (as FAT32) and "safely remove" it from here as well. The Storage page also provides access to the Downloads settings--the WD My Book World edition has a dedicated Download folder, set with public access by default--this section is where you can reassign the download folder and set a new password for it.

The Folder Shares settings page.

Acting more like a business-level NAS device than the consumer-level device it purports to be, the WD My Book World Edition lets you also set individual quota limits for users. For each existing user account, you can designate the maximum amount of space (in GB) that a user can store in his folder share (by default, individual user quotas are disabled).

Note that the Disk Manager and Volume Status buttons in the Storage settings page screenshot above, don’t really do that much or provide much relevant information. These settings are actually utilized by other WD NAS devices that use the same firmware, but which actually have multiple drives and RAID arrays. And herein lies the secret as to why a consumer-level device has such advanced configuration options: WD is using the same firmware for the WD My Book World Edition that is uses on some of its higher-end products.

The Media settings page.

Navigating photos with the built-in
Twonky Media Server.

The Media page allows you setup the WD My Book World Edition as a media server. Like most modern NAS devices, the WD My Book World Edition has a built-in iTunes server. We successfully connected to the iTunes server from both Windows and Mac systems. With an iTunes library filled with 6,142 songs (53.46GB, 24.2 days), it took iTunes about 24 seconds to display the complete library saved on our WD My Book World Edition. The WD My Book World Edition is also capable of streaming music, Internet radio, photos, and videos, to a variety of devices over the local network using the unit's built-in Twonky Media Server.

The Users settings page.

Managing user accounts.

If there is one settings page you are likely to come back to more frequently than others, it is the Users page. That is because this is where you can create, delete, and modify user accounts. When you create a user account, you designate a user name, assign a password, add the user to existing groups, determine if the user will have administrator rights, and choose whether to also automatically create a private share folder for that user; note that when you delete a user, that user's folder share does not get automatically deleted from the disk--this is an intentional safety precaution, in case there are files in the user's folder that need to be retrieved--other users who also had access to that folder can still access it, as long as their user accounts are still active.


Managing user accounts.	Managing Folder Share Permissions.

Another feature of the WD My Book World Edition that is often found only on higher-end NAS devices, is the ability to create user groups. If you have a lot of users with similar access needs, it is easier to assign folder access and rights to groups of users, instead of having to edit the settings of each user individually. This is especially useful when you have groups of users who need access to the same specific resources, such as a private FTP or media folders.

Yet another setting that is likely to be frequently used is the Folder Share Permissions. For each of the existing private folder shares, you can set up which users or groups have access to the folder and whether it is full access or read-only access. You can also turn any private folder into a public folder, and vice-versa--including even the default Public and Download public folders. You can also set public folders to full access or read only.


*The Status* page.**	The System Status page.

The final Advanced Mode page is the Status page. From here you can do things such as check on the device's up-time and how much storage capacity is utilized, as well as peruse the device's system log files.