[HN Gopher] Western Digital cloud services down for 4 days
___________________________________________________________________
Western Digital cloud services down for 4 days
Author : cloudking
Score : 326 points
Date : 2023-04-07 04:21 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (status.mycloud.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (status.mycloud.com)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Surely this will be the end for their cloud storage business. Who
| would use if after being down for 1 week and zero information
| provided through their official channels.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Western digital is the brand of drive I wanted one up from back
| when I was building a 386sx. Funny that anyone wants to buy cloud
| services from them 30 years later.
| xtracto wrote:
| Aaah I remember those darn WD DeathStar disks haha. Who in
| their right mind still trust this company?
| turnsout wrote:
| If you're on this orange website, give yourself the gift of
| building a TrueNAS (nee FreeNAS) setup. I cobbled one together in
| 2014 and it's still running nonstop. I've replaced two drives
| with absolutely zero drama, and it took about 20 minutes each
| time.
| guiambros wrote:
| Posted earlier this week [1], but didn't get much traction.
| TL;DR: yes, they were breached.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449006
| eob wrote:
| I lost a decade of family photos using a Western Digital RAID-in-
| a-box setup (WD MyCloud or something)
|
| Both hard disks fried at the same time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is one of two reasons that I stopped taking photos years
| ago.
|
| 1) I never sit and look at old photos. I've barely got enough
| time in the day to take care of the present.
|
| 2) I don't want to worry about organizing, preserving, and/or
| losing them.
|
| I have a few family portraits from over the years that are
| framed and hang on the wall. That's enough.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Both hard disks fried at the same time.
|
| I'm sorry for your family pictures: it's the one personal thing
| I've got copies of everywhere (online / offline / on-site /
| off-site).
|
| But... Regarding HDDs/SSDs failing at the same time: the common
| mantra is to be very careful of disks from the same batch.
| There have been SSDs too failing after a certain amount of
| hours of usage.
|
| I like to use different brands or, at the very least, different
| models from the same brand.
|
| Now I'm not saying it's what happened in our case: if they
| literally fried, then it's another problem.
| rvba wrote:
| Question from a laic. When someone setups a RAID they usually
| buy disks from the same manufacturer. And those might stop
| working at the same time (e.g. warranty for 24 months, so they
| 'strangely' fry in 25th).
|
| Is it possible to mix disks from different manufacturers in a
| RAID?
| jf93ap29sh wrote:
| Technically you can mix & match as long as they are of the
| same capacity. Some NAS appliances might not like that tho.
|
| But a way around what you mention, keeping it to a single
| manufacturer: is to buy the drives from different retailers,
| hopefully geographically dispersed, a few weeks apart, to
| ensure you get drives from different manufacturing batches.
|
| Unless there's a systemic issue with the entire product line
| (unlikely to go unnoticed) you spread out the risk of a
| single bad batch that way.
|
| Maybe overkill, but that's what I did many years ago.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Linux/FreeBSD software RAID (using OS tools or things like
| FreeNAS) doesn't care what the devices are, just that the
| space makes sense (e.g. for RAID1 you need 2 volumes of the
| same size).
|
| I'm not sure to the extent hardware RAID cares these days.
| NAS boxes from hard drive manufacturers might care about the
| drive vendor, but I've never used them.
| [deleted]
| dolmen wrote:
| Terms of use:
|
| YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR
| SOLE RISK AND THAT THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY,
| PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY, AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU. ALL PARTS OFTHE
| SERVICES ARE PROVIDED BY WESTERN DIGITALON AN "AS IS," "WITHALL
| FAULTS," AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS ONLY, WITH ALL FAULTS AND
| WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. WESTERNDIGITAL HEREBY EXPRESSLY
| DISCLAIMS ALL REPRESENTATIONS,WARRANTIES, AND CONDITIONS WITH
| RESPECT TO THE SERVICES (INCLUDING THE USE, PERFORMANCE, AND
| SUPPORT THEREOF), WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR
| OTHERWISE,INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A
| PARTICULAR PURPOSE, MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, AND NON-
| INFRINGEMENT.WESTERN DIGITAL DOES NOT MAKE ANY ASSURANCES WITH
| REGARD TO THE ACCURACY OF THE RESULTS OR OUTPUT THAT DERIVES FROM
| THE SERVICES.
|
| Source: https://www.westerndigital.com/legal/terms-of-use
| ferminaut wrote:
| I asked chatGPT to summarize this like I was a child:
|
| > Imagine you have a toy that you're not sure will work
| perfectly or not. The people who made the toy say that they're
| not sure either and that you have to take the risk of using it.
| They also say that if the toy doesn't work well or isn't
| accurate, it's not their fault, and they won't promise to fix
| it or make it better. They also can't promise that the results
| you get from using the toy will be correct. So, you have to be
| careful and use it at your own risk!
| j1elo wrote:
| If ChatGPT is just a glorified autocomplete engine, which
| doesn't know the context or the meaning of what is being said
| (as I've read in random discussions here on HN), then how
| come it is able to process the license text and summarize it
| in those terms? I would think that it would be needed to
| "understand" the license text in order to produce that easier
| to understand version.
|
| So, does chatGPT really know what it's writing about, or not?
| dylan604 wrote:
| it'll be funny to find some unheard of website where
| someone wrote something very similar in blog or reply in
| comment. maybe even in a usenet chat archive or something?
| nr2x wrote:
| A lot of human "decision making" literally happens _after_
| some pattern recognition system in your brain makes the
| decisions. We are all just autocompleting all day.
|
| Does ChatGPT "think"? Maybe? Do we "think" as much as we
| think we do? Maybe not?
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unconscious-
| branding...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751
| esafak wrote:
| We are "glorified" autocomplete engines too. The glory is
| in the fact that we have rich sensors, a memory, and a
| world model underpinning the engine. ChatGPT has a complex
| model, if not as complex as ours, and it is good enough to
| perform such tasks. As these models improve, they will
| compete with and outperform us on more and more tasks, at
| which point we will stop comparing our abilities to execute
| tasks.
|
| "Sure, it can do everything, but it's not human."
| acchow wrote:
| > We are "glorified" autocomplete engines too
|
| This doesn't feel intuitive to me or convincing. What
| evidence do you have to support such a claim? I certainly
| don't feel like I'm an autocomplete engine.
|
| Was Godel also an autocomplete engine? How could an
| autocomplete engine come up with novel ideas like the
| incompleteness theorems and understand them?
| codethief wrote:
| > How could an autocomplete engine come up with novel
| ideas like the incompleteness theorems and understand
| them?
|
| Depends on your definition of "novel". Ideas like the
| incompleteness theorems, General Relativity, quantum
| mechanics, etc. were certainly new/unusual given the
| status quo in science at the time but they weren't coming
| out of thin air, either[0]. In fact, could it be that
| they were inevitable, given the data? Now you're no
| longer that far away from auto-completion.
|
| [0]: We always ascribe to Einstein this singular genius
| (which he certainly was in a lot of ways) but one can
| easily forget over this that there's a clear survivorship
| bias - many other very smart people were working on
| unifying gravity with Special Relativity at that time.
| shagie wrote:
| The question then is "what are you?"
|
| Our Storytelling Minds: Do We Ever Really Know What's
| Going on Inside? -
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-
| psyched/our-s...
|
| There's a school of thought that says that "you" (the
| thing that says "I" when you think) is part of your brain
| that is making up an ongoing story about the input that
| it sees from one instant to the next to try to make it
| into a cohesive story/timeline that is fed back into
| itself to give it continuity.
|
| This can be seen when there's a severed brain (done to
| control epilepsy) so that the two halves of the brain are
| no longer able to communicate... but one half still sees
| with one eye and the other half sees with the other...
| and one half has control of one hand and the other half
| has control of the other hand... and one half can control
| what is said.
|
| --
|
| So... what are _you_?
|
| Your Brain Is a 'Prediction Machine': It Predicts What
| the Other Person Is Going to Say - https://www.learning-
| mind.com/your-brain-is-a-prediction-mac...
|
| You Took the Words Right Out of My Brain
| https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-
| publications/news/2014/april/...
|
| The "get the full input, process it, and do something"
| isn't fast enough for how you think. Your brain is trying
| to predict what is happening before it happens. Goalies
| in hokey and batters in baseball are examples of this -
| they are acting before a full set of information can be
| processed. They are predicting the future state of the
| world.
|
| With words, two people can get into the same mental state
| and be able to predict the word that the other will say
| next. Twins, spouses... and even strangers in the right
| circumstance can have this happen. We are "next word
| predictors" in that sense - and there have been
| experiments that demonstrate that (the two articles on
| the same one above).
|
| ---
|
| And so while the story that you tell yourself about how
| you think doesn't match a next word predictor (and mine
| doesn't either) - that is a model of how the mind and
| brain work that has... well, predictive power.
|
| The interesting part with GPT (to me) is that as this
| "next word prediction" gained more abilities to properly
| predict the next word it _also_ gained a world model.
|
| On the left is GPT-3.5. On the right is GPT-4 ::
| https://twitter.com/d_feldman/status/1636955260680847361
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35214218
|
| The question of "is there a world model that is contained
| within the language model that can be used?" is a rather
| interesting one. I find the image, prompt and response
| set with the balloons and "what would happen if the
| strings were cut?" to be rather fascinating.
|
| https://youtu.be/7VSWyghVZIg also goes into this.
|
| I believe you're getting too hung up on the "word" of
| "next word prediction". But instead consider the
| question: "does language enable thought?" Consider
| examples such as Koko the gorilla, Bunny the dog and
| Billie the cat. Do they think? Were they able to think
| before they had language? If you've got a program that
| can manipulate language as convincingly as a human - can
| it think for some definition of the word "think"?
| lxgr wrote:
| > I certainly don't feel like I'm an autocomplete engine.
|
| Your mind is what you think and feel with, so I'd take
| that feeling with a grain of salt on multiple levels.
|
| > Was Godel also an autocomplete engine? How could an
| autocomplete engine come up with novel ideas like the
| incompleteness theorems and understand them?
|
| I think you're reading too much value judgement into the
| (factual, if provocative) claim of "being an
| autocompletion engine" here.
| flangola7 wrote:
| >How could an autocomplete engine come up with novel
| ideas like the incompleteness theorems and understand
| them?
|
| Increase the temperature to above 0.
| acchow wrote:
| Sure, you can create new sentences. But you can't
| recognize which ones are "true" and which are not.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Neither can we. We have a lot of theorems ourselves that
| exist because they are what we consider the most likely
| solution to either extrapolating existing rules or
| modeling a set of measurements - but it's unknown as to
| whether the theory is absolutely true.
|
| a child might see that
|
| 1 + 2 = 2 + 1
|
| 4 * 3 = 4 * 3
|
| 7 + 7 = 7 + 7
|
| They might predict this may apply elsewhere, and that:
|
| 8 + 0 = 0 + 8
|
| This is the Commutative Law, which the child can predict
| exists, even if they don't have the specialty to write
| proofs and understand the theory, etc. They don't know
| that this is true, but based on their observations this
| is a theory that holds true to this situation.
| acchow wrote:
| Sure, children can pattern match. But I was thinking more
| about seasoned mathematicians, who not only create new
| theorems but can also understand proofs and thus find
| errors in proofs and decide they are wrong, or can be
| correct. They can also construct new mathematical
| structures, which other people may eventually use in
| novel ways to solve old problems. None of this seems
| anything remotely like "pattern matching" in any way.
|
| I don't disagree with the notion that "probably 80% of
| Americans/humans are just glorified autocomplete
| engines", but what about the people with proper ingenuity
| that is either provably correct in the mathematical
| sense, or can build up a tapestry of understanding from
| which we can build predictions about reality (in the
| physics sense).
|
| Pretty much everything else I do in life - riding a bike,
| cooking food, composing/enjoying music, etc - can be done
| with estimates and pattern matching. But the
| "correctness" of math proofs seems to me to not fit the
| approximation/estimations that language models use.
| esafak wrote:
| It's the "intelligence is compression/prediction"
| paradigm, which is well known in the field, if you want
| to read about it.
| maushu wrote:
| When people say that humans are "autocomplete engines"
| they are being a little facetious on the fact that we are
| pattern recognizing machines that require sensory input
| to function. Basically "autocompleting" the input we
| receive.
| thewataccount wrote:
| IDK if it helps but I find these examples interesting,
| predict the most likely word for the following phrases
| (whatever immediately comes to mind first):
|
| - hello! How are
|
| - What is 1+1?
|
| - Today is Monday. That means yesterday was
|
| - My favorite color is
|
| Humans will likely estimate these as "you", "2", and
| "sunday". For the last one, there's not enough context to
| estimate the next word, but we will almost certainly
| estimate it as a "color", and might just have to guess at
| random "red"/"blue"/"orange"/etc, so there can be
| multiple possible answers. If you've seen enough data you
| might know that a specific color like blue might be more
| frequently mentioned in this context, and would be more
| included to guess "blue" because of that.
|
| 1+1 is interesting because most humans can immediately
| estimate 2. However given the question "What is
| (3.21^7)/(3+6.4*11)?" we can no longer quickly estimate
| the answer, we would have to manually (even if mentally)
| calculate the answer. I think this closely parallels how
| our current LLMs can do basic math they've seen a lot,
| but fall apart on more complex math since they aren't
| able to do the actual calculations and are forced to
| estimate.
|
| "Today is Monday. That means yesterday was" is
| interesting because this would appear to imply that there
| is "logic". That you listed out the days of the week,
| looked at monday, and chose the day before. However, most
| likely you "just knew" it was most likely sunday given
| your previous knowledge. The LLM is unable to actually
| compute the answer, but it can estimate it based on it's
| training data.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I would think that it would be needed to "understand" the
| license text in order to produce that easier to understand
| version.
|
| Have you interacted with Markov chains before? They are
| surprisingly coherent and how they work is easier to grok
| (or implement as a weekend project)
| api wrote:
| A lot of these questions hinge on words like "think" and
| "understand" for which we do not have precise definitions.
| It's really kind of calling bullshit on a lot of the
| terminology we use to talk about thinking, revealing that
| most of it is hand wavey anthropocentrism.
|
| It does what it does. We do not know what that means. We do
| not really know how close what it is doing is to what we
| do.
|
| It's also possible that it's doing similar things to what
| we do but in some very different way. "Neural network" has
| always been a term to make biologists cringe as they're
| really only the loosest of analogies to how brains work.
| xp84 wrote:
| So true! We basically define those words almost self-
| referentially. Understanding is what human brains do, so
| by definition nothing else but a human can 'understand'
| complex things (we say).
|
| We make only slight allowances for animals, allowing that
| they can "understand" but only simple things.
|
| As this tech gets better, those who cling to that
| definition are going to get more and more uncomfortable,
| and tie themselves into more and more logical knots
| trying desperately to explain why it "doesn't count."
| lxgr wrote:
| A similar thing has happened (and arguably is still
| happening) when it comes to animal cognition.
|
| "The only species capable of recognizing itself in the
| mirror. Ok, recognizing itself in the mirror and object
| permanence. Ok, all of that and mourning its dead. Ok,
| hang on for a minute..."
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| The words it autocompleted were the most likely words
| (chains of word fragments) to come next in a theoretical
| conversation when the question as context was taken into
| consideration, given the rest of the context it's been
| trained on up to EOY 2021.
| vonnieda wrote:
| I wonder what an LLM would say if it had, say, 2 orders
| of magnitude more parameters and 46 years of training
| like I do. And if it was trained up to the millisecond
| with new inputs from millions of individual sensors. It
| might say:
|
| > I wonder what an LLM would say if it had...
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > I would think that it would be needed to "understand" the
| license text in order to produce that easier to understand
| version.
|
| well IMO it did, so it does. So yes, it 'understands' by
| your predicate.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Warning: this product might be the polar opposite of what you
| want.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| But we'll take your money anyway.
| codeflo wrote:
| When will "I asked ChatGPT" stop being posted in response to
| every other HN comment?
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [dead]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Had multi day outage at my ISP and checked the TOS. IT had
| similar language including indemnifying them from
| secondary/indirect damages caused by negligence or malice on
| their part.
| jkaptur wrote:
| I love that the typos ("OFTHE", "WESTERN DIGITALON") are in the
| original too.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Random question; why are terms written in all caps?
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| To make them harder to read.
|
| Edit: In this case it appears they're using it for emphasis,
| since the majority of the ToS is in normal caps, but it was
| definitely a deliberate dark pattern until very recently to
| make the ToS hard to read.
| Closi wrote:
| This isn't true - caps are a legal standard in the USA to
| indicate that this section is higher-importance for the
| reader. It's actually a legal obligation to make your terms
| "conspicuous".
|
| So it's actually supposed to be the opposite - to meet a
| legal obligation to highlight to users that they should pay
| particular notice to certain sections.
| WindyLakeReturn wrote:
| Something can be legally required but also have been
| originally made into a requirement as a dark pattern. The
| idea that something is legally defined as being
| 'conspicuous' in a way that makes it less conspicuous
| makes me consider that a dark pattern was the original
| intent. While I commonly hear to never attribute to
| malice what can be explained by incompetence, I don't
| feel that is applicable to the legal system.
| Closi wrote:
| It's a legal document following precedent about contract
| law. Lawyers and the companies they represent are usually
| better served by following established legal precedent
| than veering off it.
|
| Let's say the lawyers decide to be 'creative' and then
| bold the text instead, and then it gets copied into a
| page and some CSS renders it without bold text - suddenly
| the contract might have legal challenges, and the lawyers
| will rightly be asked why they decided to not follow
| established industry and legal norms.
|
| I think it's a bit silly too, but if I was hiring an
| American lawyer I would want them to follow established
| norms rather than come up with their own unique and
| legally-untested interpretation of what is required.
| rationalist wrote:
| PARAGRAPHS OF ALL CAPS is harder to read for some people.
| Closi wrote:
| It's not supposed to be easier to read, it's supposed to
| make it clear to the reader that it's important.
|
| (I'm not a fan of it anyway - I'm from the UK and think
| it's silly, but I've come across this plenty during
| contract negotiations with American lawyers that will
| insist on certain sections being in caps)
| Villodre wrote:
| READABILITY AND FRIGHTENING LEGALESE
| Closi wrote:
| There are legal requirements in the USA to ensure certain
| parts of an agreement are "conspicuous" (ie should be made so
| that consumers/customers don't miss them). Placing the terms
| in caps is a historical way to achieve the legal bar for
| this, so is a legal tradition in the USA.
|
| In other legal systems (eg the UK) you don't get this, it's a
| uniquely American phenomenon as far as I know.
| lxgr wrote:
| I've noticed that too. IRONICALLY IT MAKES THESE PARTS OF A
| CONTRACT QUITE HARD TO READ, IN MY EXPERIENCE.
| Villodre wrote:
| I'm glad this is the first comment, because there's no way
| these terms of use would (should?) fly in the EU. I don't know
| about the USA, but it is plain deception to advertise a service
| along a product and then proclaim that you're in no way
| responsible of how it works or if it does at all.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| > there's no way these terms of use would (should?) fly in
| the EU
|
| Do you have an actual concrete reason to believe that, or is
| this just "the EU is morally superior to everywhere else"
| vibes?
| germanier wrote:
| Stuff like that is covered by the Sales of Goods Directive
| (2019/771)
| fishywang wrote:
| does that mean it could fly if it's free? (for example, a
| lot of OSS license has similar disclaimer)
|
| I don't know wd's case in particular, but just curious:
|
| 1. would it fly if the cloud service is also free (no
| additional subscription fee)?
|
| 2. or is it that even if the cloud service itself is
| "free", they only allow people with wd hardware products
| to use it, so it's considered part of those hardware
| products, so it's not really free and is still covered by
| that directive?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| As I understand it you can legally create a "sale"
| without money changing hands.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| How is it a sale if no money has changed hands? It's not
| even a barter. It's nothing.
| germanier wrote:
| Simplified, the seller is responsible as long as the
| buyer can reasonably expect the feature to work based on
| public statements by the seller and their supply chain
| (including the manufacturer).
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| What "goods" do you get from a cloud service? Buy some HW
| next time _someone else 's computer_ fails.
| [deleted]
| xp84 wrote:
| By contrast, it's the case with nearly all products here.
| It's part of the standard boilerplate that comes with any
| software product license to explicitly disclaim all
| warranties, even the implied one that would otherwise exist.
| Usually phrased like:
|
| > [Company] specifically disclaims all indirect or implied
| warranties to the full extent allowed by applicable law,
| including without limitation all implied warranties of, non-
| infringement, merchantability, title or fitness for any
| particular purpose. No oral or written information or advice
| given by [Company], its agents or employees shall create a
| warranty.
|
| So, you can sell software with claims that it does anything,
| and if it does nothing at all, is useless, and actually burns
| your house down, the standard industry practice is that your
| TOS should make explicitly clear that that's not your
| problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > proclaim that you're in no way responsible of how it works
| or if it does at all.
|
| This is pretty much any software license, since they existed.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Everytime I see something like this I always think of the
| dilbert where the PHB says
|
| "It's better than legal we are using the law to keep justice
| away!"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So pretty much exactly the same protections as just storing the
| data locally on your own computer....
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| I checked on the live version, if WD cannot afford
| proofreaders, imagine how well they can take care of your data,
| oh well...
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Way back in 2012 when I started my last startup, I had setup some
| quick and easy redundant WD NAS drives lol.
|
| I couldn't ever keep them in sync, the remote piece never worked,
| and one of the drives died within the first few months lol..
|
| They ended up in the garbage, with a bunch of drill holes through
| the drives.
|
| I quickly throw together a Freenas server with 4 redundant disks,
| and we never lost data for over a decade after that switch.
| Freenas scaled with us as we grew, and 4 drives grew into over 32
| drives spread over a couple Dell poweredge clusters. When COVID
| hit and everyone went into lockdown, Freenas saved the day for us
| once again. I had already setup our storage servers behind a VPN,
| and when everyone quit coming into the office, they already had
| all their files synced up to their laptop from Freenas :)
| wil421 wrote:
| I use FreeNAS with WD Red (non-same) drives and everything
| works fine. Guessing you used some WD software.
| tyfon wrote:
| I've had 5x4TB WD Reds for about 10 years, I did have to
| replace one at some point but my synology supported
| hotswapping it and restoring everything.
|
| Have not had an issue with the others, would buy those drives
| again :)
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Yea, WD makes really good enterprise and NAS grade drives
| lol..
|
| However back in 2012, we had a laptop that died with about 3
| months worth of work gone. I ran out to Microcenter and
| bought 2 of the WD MyCloud NAS devices. It was like a mini
| Linux machine with a single NAS drive and an Ethernet port.
|
| They worked great for about a month; but they lacked the
| ability to do auto backups of themselves to another spare
| MyCloud device. We initially had a quick SOP on how to
| copy/paste the primary drive to the secondary drive, but the
| drives became out of sync within a month. Our primary MyCloud
| device locked up within a month and bricked the drive. We
| were SOL once again, and only had a semi copy on the backup
| drive.
|
| I bought a pc case, a supermicro board with ECC memory on
| eBay, and 4 WD Red NAS drives.
|
| Problem was solved, and I destroyed the MyCloud devices lol..
| WD wasn't really concerned either when I contacted them.
|
| I must say, Tom Lawerence of Lawerence Systems on YouTube was
| one of the biggest aids for us when we were setting up and
| scaling our large it systems.
|
| https://youtu.be/vxFNBZIAClc
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Tom Lawerence is a treasure, such a fantastic channel.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > WD makes really good enterprise and NAS grade drives
|
| Well, sort of, as long as you're extremely careful about
| what you buy from them:
|
| https://honeypot.net/post/staying-away-from-wd-nas-drives-
| fo...
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Around 10 years ago, when cloud storage services got going, I
| copied all my stuff to Google Drive, thinking this was gonna
| solve all my problems. Well, 10 years later, in 2023, I've
| finally finished copying all my stuff back down to my laptop and
| storing anything important on 3 different 256-GB removable USB
| drives. I keep some stuff in Google Drive, mostly throw-away
| stuff, like goofy pictures I wanna share. But anything important
| is local now. I just got tired of weird policy changes, sometimes
| data would go missing, only to magically reappear a few days
| later, and I just lost trust in all cloud storage services. And
| this incident with WD is a great example of that.
| ksec wrote:
| Now that Apple made Cloud Storage encryption a thing. They should
| remake the Time Machine and allow user to backup their iOS and
| Mac on Time Machine, while upselling you iCloud as Off Site
| Backup.
| greatgib wrote:
| People should really be clueless or out of their mind to trust
| this kind of company with their data on the cloud.
|
| Company like that have no idea how to do serious storage, for
| them it is just a checkbox on a "recurring revenue increase" OKR
| objective.
| voytec wrote:
| It's more problematic in some areas, like wireless access
| points. Any reliable maker these days? Cisco Meraki sends data
| to their "cloud" (or even has to be managed through cloud
| services) and so does Ubiquiti hardware.
| jsnk wrote:
| "Western Digital is cutting 251 workers in California"
|
| https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/22/western-...
|
| A possible contributing cause
| 0xy wrote:
| Who buys this garbage? I swore off WD and refunded several drives
| after their SMR scam. I wouldn't touch any of their online
| services.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I've bought around like 9 WD HDDs so far, passports, books,
| internal SATA ones, Red NAS ones, and all of them are either
| still running or never outright failed. Meanwhile 2 of the 3
| Seagate HDDs I had failed in a way that resulted in data loss
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Needless to say I only buy WD if I ever still need an HDD.
| Wouldn't ever use their cloud though.
| Latty wrote:
| Looking at Backblaze's stats, it's true WD are a little
| better off, but not by a huge amount.
|
| If you care about a single drive dying, then yeah, buy WD I
| guess, but at the same time, I can't imagine a sane case to
| rely on any single drive not failing. I'd _always_ have
| redundancy if I am talking spinning disk (and of course
| backups regardless), because the reality is no matter who
| makes it, eventually it 'll die, and none of them can
| guarantee anything.
| can16358p wrote:
| Yup this.
|
| As pure hard drives, they are rock solid. Any other WD
| services (especially cloud): stay away from them as if they
| are radioactive.
| janpieterz wrote:
| Had to look up[1] what the SMR scam was about, short summary:
| different disks with lower random I/O performance were sold
| without being marked as such.
|
| 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-
| di...
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| The problem with SMR is not the worse performance, but
| inability of operating as just a plain hard drive.
|
| You throw terabytes at CMR drive - it's just writes them to
| LBAs.
|
| You do the same at SMR drive - as soon as it's depletes
| FastCache/MediaCache or whatever it's called (buffer zones in
| CMR style to handle bursts of incoming data) it crawls to
| 1990's speeds OR even drops out of system.
|
| But honestly, there is almost no options left at the moment.
| There is no 2.5" CMR drives anymore and with 3.5" it's only a
| bigger disks with a price premium.
| darkhelmet wrote:
| The tech behind SMR is intriguing to me, but I really don't
| want it anywhere near data that I consider important.
|
| A lot of folks don't realize that SMR drives have a lot
| more in common with SSD firmware with its emulated virtual
| block layer and wear leveling than a traditional HDD.
| Having the same kind of virtual block layer is where the
| problems come from.
|
| With SSDs, virtual blocks stored in pages that are about to
| be erased have to be relocated elsewhere. SMR drives have
| to do the same sort of thing but with sequential recording
| for the overlapping tracks. All the same nightmares exist
| including garbage collection/reclaimation, de-
| fragmentation, managing TRIM (or parsing NTFS data
| structures), etc etc. With SMR, handling the worst case
| scenarios are made more difficult by seek latency -
| something that isn't as much of an issue for SSD storage.
|
| All of this tends to invalidate cherished assumptions that
| unix/linux file systems make about HDD storage. And that's
| ignoring the issues about the devices reaching timeout
| thresholds - again, the kinds of things that Windows is OK
| with but really hurts linux/unix systems.
| aednichols wrote:
| All WD Red Plus and Red Pro drives are CMR, and span from 1
| TB to 22 TB.
| karolist wrote:
| How do I find/identify these remaining CMR models?
| b3lvedere wrote:
| They're not that bad in my humble opinion. I've done
| maintenance on hundreds of Dell and HP workstations which had
| WD disks (From nvme to ide disks). They're just a bit slow.
|
| Never trusted WD cloud though. History taught me no disk or nas
| is safe when it's reachable via the big bad internet.
| kragen wrote:
| there isn't a wide selection of hard disk manufacturers left,
| and none untainted with the smr scam afaik
|
| that is of course no reason to touch their online services
| Latty wrote:
| WD was kinda the worst for putting it into their NAS product
| line though, I don't think any of the others were that bad.
|
| You are right though, hard drives are kinda all much the
| same.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I went Seagate for my NAS's HDDs because they are explicit
| whether a given drive is SMR or CMR.
|
| I say this as someone who up until then always bought WD
| HDDs.
| MaKey wrote:
| I'm giving Toshiba a try now with two MG09 18TB HDDs. 5
| year warranty and peak transfer rates of nearly 300 MB/s.
| I've had bad luck with two Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 HDDs,
| they both failed after warranty was over. I think it was
| a bad model. My other Seagate disks (2x 8TB CMR and 2x
| 8TB SMR) have been working just fine for a few years.
| reitanqild wrote:
| "Lost" a lot of backups to a WD MyBook a while ago.
|
| The story is interesting enough to mention: first it showed up
| as non-formatted. Turned out the disk was encrypted and the key
| was stored in the enclosure which somehow lost it.
|
| After a while I found out the encryption key was stored on the
| disk on a predictable location and could be extracted and used
| to decrypt the disk, but at that point the disk had stopped
| answering completely.
|
| I still keep it around because someday I will probably try to
| get a recovery company to look at it, but I still wonder why
| they put that "encryption" feature there in the first place.
| astral303 wrote:
| the consumer has no choice. if you buy an HDD, you gambling.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| The crazy thing is their MyCloud line up used to support local
| only operation until an OS upgrade disabled it apparently.
|
| Just their MyCloud hard drive + syncthing has been my ideal
| backup solution for all my devices for about 5 years now. Any
| document I save on any of my device instantly gets replicated
| onto all my devices. Any picture/video i take on my phone gets
| backed up to my NAS automatically. I used to host a browser based
| file manager and had dynamic dns pointing to that NAS for the
| rare use case where i wanted to share a file with someone via a
| link.
|
| Such a shame I'll have to re do all this set up if/when i need to
| move away from that drive...
| Moru wrote:
| I'm using Resilio Sync (former bittorrent sync) to make a
| backup sync from all devices (one-way sync) and then do a
| normal backup of that folder to other media since a sync folder
| isn't really a backup. No cloud functionality, only your own
| devices with the speed of whatever network speed you have at
| home or on the go.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Hey I have a WD MyCloud with OS5 (updated to latest release)
| and it works localy. I've disabled all the silly cloud and
| online services and I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS.
| It's people who were using the cloud features that are affected
| by this hack.
|
| To be clear and honest, other vendors have faced similar
| issues. I remember D-Link many years ago and Synology more
| recently. We have to accept that all cloud services are
| susceptible to attacks, downtime and so it's always good to
| have local (and offsite) backups of your important files.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS.
|
| I think the problem is the newer models. I also have a WD
| MyCloud, but the "newer" Home edition one, and a lot of the
| features do _not_ work locally, and require cloud
| connections. (Even local LAN-only file transfers, or managing
| the onboard Plex server and such, all have random cloud
| server junk shoved in the middle of them, to handle
| authentication and such)
|
| I had to take pliers and scissors to mine and cut the
| harddrive out to rescue the data earlier this year, when the
| internal network board couldn't successfully reach WD's cloud
| system for some reason. I have to imagine any of the folks
| who bought devices like mine are just SOL until WD gets
| service back up.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Ohh interesting.. do the existing applications like syncthing
| etc.. work on OS5?
|
| I've currently disabled all cloud functionality.. i don't
| think i ever even registered an account with them. I remember
| reading that cloud account is mandatory after the update, so
| i had to disable the updates.
|
| On my current OS, i ran a little piece of JS to enable third-
| party applications, from which I've installed syncthing. It
| freed up my raspberry Pi to do other things...
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| If you have automatic updates turned on, I would still assume
| you were breached. It can remotely re-enable cloud services
| and there's all kinds of unknown implementation details.
| rr808 wrote:
| Every nas will have software that will sync to cloud storage s3
| etc. Pretty trivial to set up usually.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Nope, MyCloud NAS with latest upgrades and without any cloud
| works fine here. I wouldn't even think of trusting my data to
| WD whose expertise is hard drives and anything software is
| obviously an unloved and underfunded child, born out of
| necessity.
| gcr wrote:
| How do you get syncthing to back up photos on your phone? Are
| you on Android?
| hezag wrote:
| You can share the Camera folder with the "send only" mode in
| the phone app.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Why not just use syncthing? I do that. You can even set up an
| encrypted node on e.g. an aws vps. That node won't see any of
| your files but still any them.
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| I'm currently using syncthing itself on MyCloud.
|
| I had to run a little script to enable third party
| applications on MyCloud and installed syncthing from that.
|
| Thanks for the tip about the encrypted node though
| MrFoof wrote:
| The reality is WD My Cloud was breached yet again:
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/1681254/western-digitals-my-...
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| Was gonna say that my defualt mindset is now "If something is
| down for longer than a day, they have been breached!".
| jmathai wrote:
| I worked at WD for about 2 years (via acquisition). I never
| really used their cloud services for any personal reason -
| because I either couldn't get them to work or didn't trust
| them.
|
| I wouldn't use their MyCloud NAS devices as a reliable place to
| store any important data.
|
| Their cloud services routinely go down like this. And they just
| don't communicate with their users.
| COGlory wrote:
| >"Western Digital is currently experiencing a service outage
| impacting the following products: My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My
| Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, SanDisk Ixpand
| Wireless Charger"
|
| In what world does a wireless charger need a cloud?
| dpedu wrote:
| Perhaps it does something like the iPhone's "Clean Energy
| Charging" feature? This requires some sort of internet
| connection to know when to charge.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323
| patrickthebold wrote:
| Presumably the phone knows the time and the charger does
| not need to connect to the internet.
| afavour wrote:
| "Ixpand" is the clue: it comes bundled with a photo backup
| service. Presumably the charger itself is working just fine.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Another typical corporate status page that has no real
| information and it's of no value. Why do companies still have
| these silly pages that don't actually provide any helpful
| information to their users/customers? They also don't offer info
| or real support over at their forum as well, same corporate
| silence https://community.wd.com/
| owyn wrote:
| Because it's a checklist/todo item for most companies.
|
| "Oh, Fred, that status page thing, is it done?"
|
| "Yep, I got this perl script, it even updates the timestamp
| automatically! update_status.pl <intensity> <reason>".
|
| "Good enough, ship it."
|
| (sometime in the future - the site goes down)
|
| Oh, where's that perl script? Fred went on vacation...
| expertentipp wrote:
| Fred was impatiently mumbling about one service, need to
| refactor it or something. What a maniac. We are busy with
| kubernaytez and ay-eye. Would a chat work instead of status
| page perhaps?
| lionkor wrote:
| > Would a chat work instead of status page perhaps?
|
| That is truly an expertentipp.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Fred has been laid off. Monica and Charles over in
| Marketing handle status updates now with generic tweets
| about how we care deeply about our customers and lots of
| cool emojis
| alexjplant wrote:
| Am I the only person on the Earth that enjoys using
| Kubernetes?
|
| Running it yourself or having to deal with buying it from
| IBM is no fun at all but manaed k8s (GKE, DO, etc) works
| great and beats the ever-living hell out of managing server
| state. JMO.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| It's not like this. Corporations are actually lying and just
| putting up static pages to fool their customers. Fred simply
| does what he was assigned to.
| [deleted]
| djbusby wrote:
| There is no Fred
| usr1106 wrote:
| Providing no information and no value is a very positive way to
| express it. They are just lying. They do know that they had
| inappropriate security, an attacker was able to steal data and
| they have taken the system down before other attackers can
| exploit the hole.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Services down for such a long time. It can only mean 2 things:
| huge security breach or data loss.
| voytec wrote:
| Recently, also effects of extensive layoffs.
| dolmen wrote:
| WDC is a public company. Silence is the rule.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| So is Cloudflare, and they're great about stuff like this.
| raizer88 wrote:
| Because the status page can be used against the company in case
| of litigation. So basically you have 2 way of doing it, an easy
| one where it's just an on/off, and an hard one where the legal
| team write it (after 2 weeks of internal discussion).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's essentially a smoke signal.
| riogordo2go wrote:
| "Some of our customers are experiencing elevated error rates"
| while in reality the entire service is down.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Probably they are clueless themselves!
| quaintdev wrote:
| Another reason to self host https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-
| self-hosting/
| rwalle wrote:
| Try sending this URL to your uncle.
|
| Hacker news is not the entire world.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The problem with self hosting is that it quickly becomes very
| insecure and unreliable because it needs to be managed and most
| people don't like managing it. Even if you are fine with
| managing it, strange errors will occur and you will solve those
| errors by following tutorials and you(maybe not you
| specifically, but most people) wouldn't know what you are doing
| and you will introduce security holes.
|
| Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software
| which doesn't have settings and runs on a box which also
| doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the
| wall and forget about it.
|
| Which is actually what WD is trying to do but apparently your
| setup can go down for days because it has an intermediary
| component which needs to be managed, can get compromised and
| can go down.
| dannyw wrote:
| > Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software
| which doesn't have setting and runs on a box which also
| doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the
| wall and forget about it.
|
| Buy a Synology DiskStation, and you get an easy-to-use yet
| customisable OS, that receives security updates for up to a
| decade.
|
| Also comes with checksums/data scrubbing (btrfs; like zfs),
| Docker support, snapshots, E2E diff-based backups to your
| choice of cloud provider, an _optional_ cloud-based NAT-
| puncher if you don 't like/know to set up port forwarding,
| etc.
|
| Sure, the hardware has a markup, but you're paying for a
| nearly-Apple-like experience that's still crazily
| customisable. I've had zero complaints.
| function_seven wrote:
| Does the $200 model still support all of that? I know I
| need to get my ass in gear and fix my storage and backups.
| I'd also like to start replacing my Wyzecams with and IP
| NVR.
|
| But I've been in a frugal mood lately, I find it hard to
| spend over $500 on an item like this.
| rcarmo wrote:
| They all run the same software.
| dannyw wrote:
| However, the cheaper models don't necessarily have all
| the features.
|
| I believe the $249 DS223 does indeed support all of the
| features I mentioned above.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| But does it do them all at once with its available RAM? I
| got bit by this by buying a low-end QNAP NAS that only
| had a gig of RAM and found that it was non-upgradable and
| severely limited the number of services it could run at
| once.
| dannyw wrote:
| I run a bittorrent client, a light web service docker,
| Video Station, Photoprism, and a VPN on a 2GB Synology
| fine; along with HyperBackup, data scrubbing, snapshots,
| etc. The official Synology services are pretty RAM-
| optimised.
|
| It does get pretty tight, I probably wouldn't want to be
| adding any more services, but it's fine for my use cases.
| inconceivable wrote:
| you can run synology software on generic hardware
|
| https://xpenology.org/#What_is_Xpenology
|
| having said that i bought the $200 model (220j) with a
| steep discount with points on amazon and it works fine
| but is a little slower than the others. i just use it for
| rsync (which never-deletes by default) and as an SMB
| server.
|
| note the 220j unit doesn't do btrfs. the nas software
| seems pretty good but i don't use much of it. it takes
| some configuring to setup proper user home directories to
| rsync with but it only took me a few minutes of googling
| to figure it out. also their macos backup agent software
| kind of sucks but if you're using it for rsync or as a
| NAS volume it seems to work great. i don't use any of
| synology cloud or public cloud features.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I love my Synology NAS, enough that I now have 2 for
| different use cases.
|
| My only issue with them was when I emailed them to confirm
| that I could have it connected to my network but not have
| internet access (people calling "wifi" or "ethernet"
| internet still drives me up the wall) since I was going to
| block its internet access on my router.
|
| First I had issues getting support to understand the
| distinction between "network" and "internet". Second once I
| finally did get someone who understood I was asked "Why" or
| "what was I trying to accomplish". It almost put me off
| purchasing it that I would be asked why I would want a
| device like a NAS to have zero internet connectivity.
|
| That aside I would agree and it does feel like a very apple
| like experience (maybe a bit more technical). I mean it
| isn't as easy as the time capsule was years ago, but its up
| there.
| burntwater wrote:
| Asking "why" or "what are you trying to accomplish?" is
| standard and good practice - a good person (technician,
| manager, or many other roles) wants to get at the root of
| the question so they can provide a genuine solution. I'm
| sure we've all experienced times where someone asks you
| an odd question, you ask what they're trying to do, and
| you come up with a much better solution (or better/more
| accurate way of asking the question) than what would have
| been provided in simply answering the first question.
|
| Granted, it's frustrating when you are a well-informed
| person that knows _exactly_ what they 're looking for. I
| just accept it as a cost of dealing with other people.
| nerdjon wrote:
| TBH maybe it was the fact that it took a few emails to
| get there that it felt annoying?
|
| I mean I recognize that they may be dealing with far less
| technical people and maybe that is a valid question.
|
| I get what your saying but wouldn't "I don't want my NAS
| to have an internet connection but I want to make sure it
| still works locally" be mostly self explanatory?
|
| Maybe that is me putting more faith in other people than
| I should, like obviously it won't be able to update, sync
| with a cloud, or any other number of things. Maybe thats
| not obvious?
|
| But also to be clear the bad taste it gave me was seeing
| products that should have no need for an active internet
| connection and yet are paper weights without it. So when
| a company seems to be pushing me to connect something to
| the internet, especially something as sensitive as a
| NAS... it sets off alarms.
| ksec wrote:
| >Buy a Synology DiskStation
|
| Synology doesn't update their Kernel. Only the latest
| release model in 2023 comes with 5.10. The others are on
| 4.x, and if you bought any before 2020 you may be on 3.x.
| On the 2023 model You would have thought they would at
| least be on 5.15, no.
|
| All Entry level model doesn't come with BTRFS.
|
| But apart from that, it is still the best in the market
| right now.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > Buy a Synology DiskStation
|
| I did that, and I have to say it does NOT play with linux
| very nicely. I had to change the UID and GID on my desktop
| for my default user and all of my files because Ubuntu
| starts with UID 1 and Synology starts with UID 26, so after
| you figure out how to mount the disk as nfs it says you
| don't have permission to access it (because your UID does
| not match the UID of the device). Solving this was one of
| those problems where you go back 10 years and so many
| people have posted forum posts and the answer was always
| some weird hack, and Synology has never fixed it. Changing
| the UID of my user on my desktop was the easiest hack. Then
| I installed another OS to dual boot and had to change the
| UID for that one too, so I could access my files, and
| somehow the "easy" NAS option has made me jump through lots
| of hoops.
|
| Turns out self hosting is not easy even when you buy a
| Synology.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| That seems weird you'd need to have the same uid/gid on
| both sides of a nfs connection.
|
| I've been using nfs for years and apparently just got
| lucky because I only ever have one user on every machine
| I use.
|
| Even my crazy hacked together Debian running WD My Book
| Live (or whatever it's real name is) has given me zero
| problems over the years.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Your choice of NFS is the issue here. I use SMB (with one
| or two shares where I remap UIDs and masks), and it has
| worked well for nearly 15 years across Linux, Mac and
| Windows clients.
| nier wrote:
| Your comment comes across as disrespectful. You could
| have asked why NFS is the preferred protocol and we all
| could have learned something.
| stcroixx wrote:
| But it's not the preferred protocol for the reasons
| explained - that's the lesson you can learn here.
| nier wrote:
| Someone using Linux preferred to connect to their
| Synology using NFS and went through some troubleshooting
| to make it work. Aren't you interested what NFS might
| have in store when cross-platform is not an issue?
| ihateyouall123 wrote:
| Need some weakness tissues?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Are you sure? To me it came off as factual. They very
| simply stated that NFS was the issue.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| FWIW I didn't sense any disrespect, although I can see
| what you read it that way.
|
| I'm guessing you saw " _your_ choice ... was the problem
| ", whereas I see "... _NFS_ was the problem ".
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Deleting those first three words would eliminate the
| unnecessary ad hominem.
| nier wrote:
| Not knowing anything about NFS but seeing that it
| supports ACLs, I wonder if your solution of changing
| account UIDs has something to with performance.
| dannyw wrote:
| Sorry to hear that, that's frustrating.
|
| For some anecdata, my Synology has always played
| perfectly with a vast assortment of Windows, Mac, Linux,
| Android, and iOS for many years, even a Chromebook!
|
| I legitimately don't remember a single error, or ever
| having to do any debugging around supported services
| (obviously my own services and dockers have been a bit
| more involved)
|
| I use SMB though
| fulafel wrote:
| I've had tech savvy friends have good brand (don't remember
| if qnap or synology) NAS devices compromised. OS patches
| help but for example the 3rd party stuff you install might
| be a risk, or things that are patched too slowly in the os,
| etc. In the end you still need to manage and monitor it.
|
| It seems a lot of guidance about securing your NAS (eg [1])
| starts with "it's bad if it's directly connected to the
| internet". So if you want to use the internet, it may be a
| better bet to use a managed service (or maybe look for a
| more security focused product?).
|
| [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-
| synology-secu...
| jhugo wrote:
| I usually turn off all "cloud" / Internet-accessible
| features of everything (and, where possible, even block
| things from Internet access), and then have a Wireguard
| VPN back to my home network. I think this is a better
| balance of security and usability than trusting that all
| of the NAS/camera/doorknob/printer/etc vendors are any
| good at securing these things.
| fulafel wrote:
| The use of VPNs to mitigate iffy security in self-hosted
| stuff is common but comes with its own problems,
| simultaneously it makes your self-hosted services harder
| to access (or impossible from some contextx), and it
| hurts security by making your system more complex (harder
| to understand & manage & monitor). They're also seemingly
| going out of fashion as zero-trust/beyondcorp/identity-
| aware proxies gain mindshare. Of course if you (along
| with friends and family) are all-in on a overlay network
| like tailscale it can be a different story.
| jhugo wrote:
| Actually, I find that a simple wireguard tunnel giving
| boring old IP routing to my home network is a far simpler
| setup than every device having its own opaque tunnel back
| to its vendor which I have to use a vendor-specific
| method of connecting to. Tailscale is also more complex,
| though a nice product. So far I haven't encountered any
| context where I couldn't connect to my wireguard tunnel,
| but YMMV.
| darkwater wrote:
| That's not self-hosting, that's giving direct access to
| your LAN to yet another corporation. Self-host ought to
| be 100% owned by you. (Yeah, it can be harder like this,
| I know)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I've been self hosting openssh _sftp_ for decades and not run
| into any problems with security as of yet but it could be I
| am just lucky. I do not expose any services to IP 's that I
| do not control with exception to my public SFTP servers but
| there is nothing sensitive or important on those. The boxes
| auto-update OS patches but I manually reboot them just to
| ensure they come back in a happy state.
|
| This is just to say that a chroot SFTP server and the lftp
| client is all one really needs to push backups to wherever
| with functionality similar to rsync but with slower directory
| enumeration because there isn't a corresponding sync client
| on the remote end. That's fine with me since I can be asleep
| when this occurs.
|
| For cell phone backups one of the many SFTP clients is
| AdminHands but I find anything for cell phones is mediocre at
| best.
| archerx wrote:
| I've been self hosting a nextcloud instance for many years
| and its been great without any issue. I love it and I use it
| everyday.
| benatkin wrote:
| I gave NextCloud a shot and didn't like it. For one thing
| whatever I had set up for it was sending too many
| notifications on Android. So YMMV.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| Although the consequences of failure are not as severe, you
| could make a similar argument against cooking your own food
| as the outcome can be unreliable and time consuming.
|
| Some enjoy doing it, some just purchase microwave food and
| some just pay or get someone else to do it for them. Then
| there are chefs in the media that try to make cooking more
| accessible with the message that it's not as difficult as
| people make it out to be.
|
| However some pushback/warning against self hosting because we
| don't yet have a good alternative to reliable "microwave
| food" is good I guess.
| bon00r wrote:
| [flagged]
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Hello, can you please expand on how using syncthing out of
| the box would be deemed insecure?
|
| Genuinely concerned ive missed something
| qwertox wrote:
| While I self-host everything, I fully agree with this.
|
| If it works and has no internet access, you'll just leave it
| there, running for a year, two years, when suddenly something
| changes. Either you need to upgrade the underlying OS to a
| new major version or some 3rd-party client changes, and
| you're confronted with a wall of stuff you must do.
|
| Or even if it's something as simple as MongoDB, after a
| _patch_ (not even a minor version bump), no longer being
| supported on the Raspberry Pi 4 even though MongoDB
| themselves posted a blog post a couple of months before that
| change showing how to easily install it on this device.
| throwaway2056 wrote:
| This.
|
| Plus: people here calling for Raspberry or Synology do not
| know 'average' users
|
| - People dont know what is ethernet
|
| - Most people cant navigate GUI of synology or other stuff
|
| - Some of the hn gurus need to work as CS for a week. People
| get confused what USB-A or USB-C cable.
|
| - For hn-gurus with Rpi/nextcloud: These products are sold to
| average joe that has no clue about tech.
|
| - for average joe people, google is internet, facebook is
| family and whatsapp is chat.
|
| - The sales guy that sold it just works for commission.
| Capitalism.
|
| - Same is for WD. They sold the product for $100 8TB so that
| is the quality one expects.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Most people cant navigate GUI of synology or other stuff
|
| Sad non-average user noises.
| eitland wrote:
| Question is for each of us who are experts in the field: do
| we continue to encourage this trend or do we encourage
| people to learn?
|
| I grew up in a time and an environment where I felt
| everyone taught and everyone shared.
|
| It feels like more and more everything is _made_ harder
| despite everything really being more accessible than before
| - if you only know.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's not even a question because this has played out time
| and again: The commons value simplicity and convenience,
| and products will naturally gravitate towards such
| offerings over time as technologies evolve.
|
| I firmly believe that "appliance" computers like
| Macbooks, Chromebooks, game consoles, and smartphones are
| the future and ultimate destination of personal
| computing. Much as I hate to say it: Fucking nobody cares
| about being a power user, about messing with their
| computer. For the commons, a computer is merely just
| another appliance and tool to serve and enable bigger
| interests, a means to an end.
|
| We should also remember that, eventually, the time will
| come when _we_ become the technologically illiterate
| luddites, unable to "get" the new fangled tech that the
| youngsters will immediately master as they point and
| laugh at our seeming ineptitude.
| Karunamon wrote:
| That last statement is not necessarily true. Becoming
| technologically illiterate, outside of bona fide medical
| problems like Alzheimer's making it impossible to think,
| is a choice. Say no to becoming that person.
| freehorse wrote:
| > Fucking nobody cares about being a power user, about
| messing with their computer.
|
| No, people care only to have somebody that cares around,
| so that they can solve their issues. Do you think people
| with macbooks etc never encounter issues with
| software/hardware and all just work automatically always
| without having to care about anything? This is an
| illusion, and in the end of the day you (or someone) has
| to put the extra work.
|
| It is similar to what happened to electronic and other
| devices through the years, everything becomes more user
| friendly but also more complex and opaque the same time,
| so younger generations were getting more and more
| clueless how these devices worked. I do not know how
| things will go now, but I see the same trend as
| computers, I do not see the older generation becoming
| technologically illiterate luddites (ok I do mot use tik
| tok so maybe that makes me one) as much as I see that the
| the big part of the younger generations not knowing much
| more than touching stuff on a screen. I do not see that
| the proportion of more technically adept people increased
| at all. But yeah, maybe there is some new neurotechnology
| thing or whatever at some point that changes things, but
| not something I see with present tech.
| throwaway2056 wrote:
| > Question is for each of us who are experts in the
| field: do we continue to encourage this trend or do we
| encourage people to learn?
|
| This is will not happen. Every other tech fellow I speak
| to (working in SAP-/Oracle/google/type Giant to a
| startup) tells me that I just do it as I need $$$. Done.
| As long as they can afford/get the appropriate help. They
| dont care about average joe that knows only bestbuy or
| google photos.
|
| > Do you think people with macbooks etc never encounter
| issues with software/hardware and all just work
| automatically always without having to care about
| anything? Thi
|
| The advantage is that with macbooks/chromebooks/windows
| (even ubuntu to some level) is that you can google and
| get some info. Worst case I have seen customers in Apple
| Store - with a old (i.e) 2 year old macs - asking the
| Genius to please copy everything to their new device.
|
| With Raspberry or WD - one cant do it. (Sure there are
| some Linux User Groups where an old fart will do it for a
| beer but most people dont know this)..
|
| It is a difficult challenge, ideally: one gets some kind
| of govt authorisation for a FAAANG-account - and it will
| get backup up with FAANG for some $/month. And one can
| produce some govt ID to restore it. Of course it has
| other issues - but for average Joe whose privacy is
| already lost - they would be too happy to just to get
| their wedding/holiday pics back.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >People dont know what is ethernet
|
| Correction: People don't know what is computer.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Then we need to work on it to make self hosting as
| ubiquitous as a TV. Imagine a future where all your photos,
| videos stay at your house on a box and others who have
| access can view them from anywhere.
|
| The corporations are working in direction where this is
| never possible but given how they all deal with data this
| is the only future that will be secure and makes sense.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at
| your house on a box and others who have access can view
| them from anywhere.
|
| We are slowly working towards such a future and common
| users by and large will appreciate it, but it's not going
| to be the future most tech nerds envision it to be.
| copper-float wrote:
| What are you referring to?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Basically: Convenience and customizability are mutually
| exclusive.
|
| We as tech nerds value our ability to power user, but
| this is quite simply at odds with the interests of common
| users.
|
| Things like further and further abstractioning of file
| systems, further and further integrations of operating
| systems with online accounts and other internet services,
| further and further "appliance"ing of computer systems,
| etc.
| lolc wrote:
| In what ways will the average homebox be more secure than
| the average cloud hosting?
| autoexec wrote:
| > In what ways will the average homebox be more secure
| than the average cloud hosting?
|
| No third parties will be automatically rummaging through
| your files and using it to stuff a dossier with details
| about you to sell or exploit for profit.
|
| The webserver in your living room will only host your
| personal files, so it isn't a single target that can
| grant a hacker massive amounts of valuable data from
| hundreds of thousands of users at once if they can manage
| to get in. If a hacker takes the time to break into your
| server, they maybe get a handful of baby photos and MP3s,
| but before that they'd have to somehow know about and
| find your server specifically in the first place.
|
| When your server gets hacked, you aren't going to pretend
| it isn't happening, or lie to yourself about what
| happened, and you won't have to spend days wondering what
| the impact to you was, and you won't bend over backwards
| to try to downplay that impact for the sake of your
| shareholders.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> The webserver in your living room will only host your
| personal files, so it isn't a single target that can
| grant a hacker massive amounts of valuable data from
| hundreds of thousands of users at once if they can manage
| to get in._
|
| Just because it's not running under a single domain
| doesn't mean hundereds of thousands of users can't be
| affected by a single vulnerability. If everyone was using
| Nextcloud on Ubuntu and a vulnerability is found
| somewhere in that stack then attackers could easily scan
| the internet for unpatched installations. Happens all the
| time with corporate IT.
|
| Also, people don't just store family photos and MP3s.
| They also store intimate photos, financial data, company
| data, health data, scans of passports and other official
| documents, utility bills, plenty that can be used as
| proof of identity and proof of address. If you had access
| to the contents of my hard drive you could easily
| impersonate me in almost every context.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Just because it's not running under a single domain
| doesn't mean hundereds of thousands of users can't be
| affected by a single vulnerability.
|
| That's fair, although it's much easier to find a heavily
| advertised corporate network and scan that than it is to
| scan the entire IPv4/6 space looking for a particular
| vulnerable server (which isn't to say that it doesn't
| happen). One advantage you have with a home server too is
| that hackers can't create legitimate accounts on your
| server to poke around and look for holes.
|
| > They also store intimate photos, financial data,
| company data, health data, scans of passports and other
| official documents, utility bills,
|
| People do have those things on hard drives, but I don't
| think most people would put that on their living room
| webserver. At least I don't think that was what was meant
| by "Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay
| at your house on a box and others who have access can
| view them from anywhere." I assumed that "box" was a
| separate web/file server specifically designed and used
| for sharing your personal files and not the same device
| people would use to pay their bills and store their
| nudes. Keeping those two things separate would certainty
| be good practice!
| mihaaly wrote:
| "it quickly becomes very insecure and unreliable"
|
| As anything else! As the above picture shows.
|
| With the added bonus that you are cluless of the state of a
| Cloud (no insights of its real state, its actual practices,
| also kept in darkness, only over confident corporate
| statements).
|
| (actually there are quite fine self hosted products with
| maintainance updates and help where you do not have to be an
| IT practitioner to use, equal to the level required from
| Cloud services, just look around)
| bastard_op wrote:
| So much for trusting the cloud, WD is just another dysfunctional
| company that can't manage security.
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