MyBook access from Linux

I just spent most of an evening trying to access my Western Digital MyBook Live net drive from a machine running Debian Linux. Got there eventually, so if I write out the steps that worked, it might save someone a few headaches:

You will need to apt-get install nfs-common and portmap - this is the networking file system drivers - you may well have them already. So, as root:


apt-get install nfs-common portmap


Then, still as a super user run:

showmount -e 192.168.0.2(use the ip address of your MyBook)

This should return a couple of lines of text something like this:


Export list for 192.168.0.2:
/nfs *

The first term on the second line is telling you the mount point you need to access to get at the files on the netdrive, so next - still as root - type:
mount (ipAddr):(2nd line of showmount response) (your chosen mount point)
eg:
mount 192.168.0.2:/nfs /mnt/mybook

Now you should be able to access the public folders on the network drive by navigating to /mnt/mybook in the file manager, terminal, etc.

If this worked, you can then mount the net drive at startup by editing the file /etc/fstab (need to be super user to do this)
add a line like the following:
(ip-addr):(2nd line of showmount response) (your chosen mount point) nfs defaults 0 0
eg:
192.168.0.2:/nfs /mnt/mybook nfs defaults 0 0

And that should be you done! I need to figure out how to access the private shares next, but that is for another day... :-P