What's the easiest/best way to restrict a WDTV Live Plus from writing files to my disk shares when it accesses them?  Do I have to create a new user with read only permissions and login using those credentials?

What's the easiest/best way to restrict a WDTV Live Plus from writing files to my disk shares when it accesses them?  Do I have to create a new user with read only permissions and login using those credentials?

Yes, that would probably be the easiest way.

 

What specific files are you referring to?  I don't own a WDTV Live Plus so I am a little curious.

They seem to be some sort of index files.  I just noticed them the other day when I was adding content to the server and I deleted them right away.  I also noticed a line in my syslog about the directories not being empty when I deleted them but I think that may be the case when you delete a whole directory instead of the individual files.  I'll post more detail about the files next time they show up.

First try changing the share to read-only and see what the WD does. It might throw a write error or something like that. Those are index files which it creates so it doesn't have to scan the whole share every time you access it. Basically, makes opening the share quicker.

 

Peter

They seem to be some sort of index files.  I just noticed them the other day when I was adding content to the server and I deleted them right away.  I also noticed a line in my syslog about the directories not being empty when I deleted them but I think that may be the case when you delete a whole directory instead of the individual files.  I'll post more detail about the files next time they show up.

 

I've been using a separate login with read-only for my WD Live box since I bought it.  But now that you mention hidden files (I never checked because I never allowed it to have write-access) I wonder if that's the cause of my poor experiences with the music library functionality of the WD?

 

Testing is in order for this.  Thanks for the question which begot my idea!

 

Since unRAID really doesn't support different user level access to the data yet (that I am aware of), the only way to do this would be to make the share read only.

 

A read only share that is advertised and maybe one that is read write that is not advertised might work as the WDTV won't find the hidden share that is writable. But I haven't played with this yet as I am waiting for user perms.

I wonder if that's the cause of my poor experiences with the music library functionality of the WD?

 

Most likely.

 

Peter

Since unRAID really doesn't support different user level access to the data yet (that I am aware of), the only way to do this would be to make the share read only.

 

A read only share that is advertised and maybe one that is read write that is not advertised might work as the WDTV won't find the hidden share that is writable. But I haven't played with this yet as I am waiting for user perms.

 

The WDTV Live Plus shows my user (e.g. //Tower/Media) and disk shares (e.g. //Tower/disk1/Media, //Tower/disk2/Media etc.) all together.  How do I make the individual disk shares invisible to the WDTV but not to my Windows machine where I do most of the file transfers manually?

Just make the disk shares read/write hidden. Then, type //Tower/disk1, //Tower/disk2 etc into windows explorer to access the drives. The drop-down at the top of windows explorer should keep those locations so you can just pick them next time.

 

Peter

Just make the disk shares read/write hidden. Then, type //Tower/disk1, //Tower/disk2 etc into windows explorer to access the drives. The drop-down at the top of windows explorer should keep those locations so you can just pick them next time.

 

Peter

 

Good idea...thanks Peter!

Since unRAID really doesn't support different user level access to the data yet (that I am aware of), the only way to do this would be to make the share read only.

It does, but not in the free version.