Raspberry Pi cluster

NAS

It’s a Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Ultra.

The 4TB version was £264.97 on Amazon.

Features

iSCSI

Unlike most home NAS devices this one comes with iSCSI. This is absolutely optional for a Raspberry Pi cluster, but gives the option of booting up the Raspberry Pis without an SD card.

SSH

It’s possible to enable SSH access to the NAS, which gives extra functionality, but it comes with a few caveats. WD’s website warns with:

Critical: The use of SSH (Secure Shell) can potentially harm the My Cloud EX2 Ultra device and could result in loss of access to the device and/or data. The use of SSH to modify or attempt to modify the device outside of the normal operation of the product voids your WD warranty.

I’m not going to question what do they mean by normal operation.

Docker

It’s possible to install a few 3rd party applications.

As you can tell it’s not too many and EX2 Ultra doesn’t officially support Git, which I found odd. Not as odd though than finding a Docker service running on the NAS.

It’s a version from 2015:

root@MyCloudEX2Ultra root # docker -v
Docker version 1.7.0, build 0baf609

Out of the box the Docker daemon is not running anything, maybe one day the whole thing disappear with a firmware upgrade if WD feels like, but I take it for now.

The NAS has ARM architecture. I couldn’t get the ARM Alpine image running, but the arm32v7 images worked. I’ve made a git container based on arm32v7/ubuntu, you can build it from source or download it from Docker hub if you’re interested.

Notes

It worth to mention that it’s a quiet device, but not silent, it has two HDDs and a fan. I’m not going to keep in in my living room.