Arch Linux

Ranmaru

Member

From: Japan

Registered: 2011-11-20

Posts: 60

[SOLVED] Connecting to a network drive via ethernet

Hello!

I seem to have a rather unusual and complicated problem here and I hope someone can help me with it.

I need to access a file that is on a network drive, namely a Western Digital MyBook Live 2TB storage. Normally, this device is supposed to be plugged into a router and can then be accessed via Samba, but I don't have a router available here. I live in some kind of student dormitory at the moment and the internet connection here is managed through a massive ethernet switch that has outlets in every room (that is: plug your cable into your wall socket and you're connected). There is no way to hook the drive up to this.
If I plug the drive directly into my ethernet port, there is no way to establish a connection. ip link tells me that the interface is up and running, but I tried pinging the whole subnet from 1 to 255 with a script which ran for hours and all I got was a bunch of error messages.

I found out, that Western Digital doesn't ship their network drives with built-in DHCP servers, so it depends on the router's server to get an address. Also, WD don't officially support Linux, so any question asked in their forums (and there are quite a few) get the same response: "Sorry, we don't support Linux and Unix and can't help you."

Is there any way I can access that drive without a router? It is really important and time is not on my side here.

Thank you.

Last edited by Ranmaru (2012-06-01 07:06:22)

syngin

Member

From: Melbourne

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 39

Re: [SOLVED] Connecting to a network drive via ethernet

Maybe I'm missing something, but can you just run a DHCP server on your Arch box?

Ranmaru

Member

From: Japan

Registered: 2011-11-20

Posts: 60

Re: [SOLVED] Connecting to a network drive via ethernet

Okay, call me stupid for not having the idea myself. That actually worked ...