I recently purchased a 1 Terabyte My Book World NAS. It’s a great way to store lots of big files to be shared across all of the computers in my home network. I also have an Xbox 360 which does a great job of playing streaming video over the network. However, the 360 can’t access network shares directly.

In the past I’ve ran a server running either Media Center on Windows or TwonkyVision or MediaTomb on Linux. However, there is a lot of additional overhead with maintaining a whole machine just for media streaming.

Fortunately, the My Book is up to the task. It just needs a little tweaking to unlock its full potential as a Linux-based machine.

The first step in enabling media streaming functionality is to gain access to the internal Linux system. I followed the instructions provided by Martin Hinner to enable SSH access on the My Book. However, I got hung up for a while on the first step:

“First of all you have to create a new user using standard web interface. SSH will not allow you to log-in as root without password.”

The instructions “create a new user using standard web interface” were a little unclear to me at first. The user that is referred to here is not the web interface user that you create the first time you log in. Rather, the user is a file sharing user created in the file sharing section of the web interface.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why that is the case. The web interface login credentials would not be the same as a file system user and you need a file system user to log in using SSH.

I decided to document this in case anyone else runs into the same confusion and hopefully they won’t spend as much time as I did figuring it out.

Filed under computer, hardware, linux, tech.
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