mgroves

So, I bought myself a MyBook World 1TB network hard drive for Christmas. I was hoping that my Xbox 360 would "just see it" on the network, and I could stick all my videos and stuff on there via my laptop, or other computer.

I was wrong on both counts.

First, no matter what I did, I couldn't get my Xbox 360 to see it.

Second, in the process of trying to hack around with it, I made this little NAS drive into a pretty versatile media server.

I found this great little wiki site that's all about hacking the MyBook World. The key? Enabling SSH. Once you have that, you then have full root access to a lightweight linux server right there in the same box. Now, this isn't exactly a powerhouse machine: it's some sort of ARM processor with something like 64mb of memory. But it turns out, you can do a lot with that.

The first step was being able to download and install/build stuff. To do that, I at least needed a compiler. Fortunately, the site above has a very handy zip file containing all I need to copy over a C compiler. Next, I installed a package manager called optware, which is kinda like an apt-get sort of thing, except it's meant to install stuff on embedded systems like NAS drives or routers.

From that point, no more compiling! I next installed ushare via optware, which is a media server. I had to play with the configuration a bit, but now my NAS drive (with a name of my choosing) shows up on Xbox 360! Woo!

But wait, there's more. Oh yes, much more. I also installed Transmission, a bittorrent client with a web interface. I think you see where this is going. My laptop is now no longer involved in any part of this. I can stick torrent files into a "watch" directory, and Transmission picks them up automatically. Of course, I can do this from any computer via SSH, or via the normal network drive share. I even installed Lynx on the NAS, so I can even skip the middleman.

And one last neat trick: I installed Python and pytvshows to automatically poll RSS feeds for shows that I want to watch and download their torrent files in the watch folder, where they get picked up my Transmission. Now it's completely hands-free! Unfortunately, pytvshows is a bit out of date, and ezrss.it doesn't seem very reliable these days. So, after CodeMash, I decided to install Ruby, and write my own torrent grabbing script.

In short, I wouldn't recommend getting this drive, unless you enjoy hacking around with it for endless hours. Fortunately for me, I'm a nerdy coder that's used compilers, linux, etc, before, so I had some idea of what I was doing. For the average Joe, this is a mountain of a task.