• Hacking WD MyBook at wikidot – Center of most of the WD hacks
• Martin Hinner's guide on enabling SSH – Enable SSH on the original configuration WD MyBook. There are some precompiled packages such as vsftpd on his site too.
• Smart Spindown for WD MyBook – Save some energy by spinning the HDD down.

When things break

• Restore the original system
• (Advanced only) Install Debian Lenny – both rescue and upgrade procedure

A commented version with some other details can be found at Hacking WD MyBook World Ed site

The system installed is full-fledged version of testing version (called lenny) of Debian, so one can use use apt-get to install packages the same way as at PC (providing you use a packages mirror, that serves arm architecture). Having successfully installed FTP (vsftpd), htop, gcc, and others, I also wanted to install Samba (as the most important part of such a device).

I was fighting with Samba at MyBook for more than two days (and nights). The problem was that it didn't want to list the shares at the server. The problem in the end was that there is a bug in Debian samba package version 3.0.28–1 – current testing (lenny) version, which has something to do with arm compiler – if you download Samba source code and compile it yourself without additional parameter -O0, the result will be the same as with the samba Debian package.

The bug has already been fixed in 3.0.28–2. This version is not in testing (lenny) yet, but you can manually download the current versions from

• Samba common: http://http.us.debian.org/…28-2_arm.deb
• Samba http://http.us.debian.org/…28-2_arm.deb

To install it do as root:

cd /tmp
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/samba/samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/samba/samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
dpkg --install samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
dpkg --install samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb
rm samba-common_3.0.28-2_arm.deb samba_3.0.28-2_arm.deb

Another way is to add sid deb sources to you /etc/apt/sources­.list

I hope that this can make somebody's fight shorter than two days…