Western Digital My Book Live Linux Install

Hardware Hub Networking
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I’m wanting to update the current software on my Western Digital My Book Live device I bought back in 2012. The software is no longer supported so I was looking for some third party/open source OS to flash on it.

I see that OpenWRT offers an image for it…
https://openwrt.org/toh/western_digital/mybooklive

I believe the CPU running on the compute module on this NAS device is an Applied Micro APM82181 which is a “Power Architecture 464 processor”.

Is there a Linux distro that supports this cpu that I can flash in lieu of OpenWRT?

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Everything usually runs in some version of Debian…

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The Linux on them by default is Debian. :rofl:

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Being realistic I’m going to say it’s not worth it, the SoC (AppliedMicro APM82181) is way to slow to be usable for any recent version of Samba (ksmb is still quite unstable). Last time I play around with it I think it managed to do 20-30mbyte/s and that was without encryption enabled. NFS might be doable but I’ve never managed to get NFS working on OpenWrt. Use the HDD(s) in another unit and recycle it, most ARM-based routers will even runs circles around it.

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I’d be happy with just SSH and 30MB/s, that’s pretty sweet for an off-site backup you can remotely upload to

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That’s likely not going to happen on the device. Just get a small ARM-board and use a USB-connected drive or a NAS-case (and/or SATA-adapter/HAT). It’ll save you a lot of time and headache.