@cat0w,
I have all Shares/folders with the exception to the Public Share set to private on my single bay My Cloud, yet a PC (using a Windows 10 PC for example) that has access to my local network but which hasn’t used a My Cloud name/password to access a Private Share can still access the My Cloud listing of the Shares (through Samba). This means two things:
One, because one can initially access the My Cloud using Windows File Explorer (and I assume other file managers) they can see the names of all the Shares. Obviously one needs to be able to see all the Shares to be able to access the Private Shares, but because there isn’t an initial password to access the root Share level on the My Cloud any Public Share folder will be accessible. Which brings up issue number two.
Two, because there is no initial password needed to access the Shares via Windows File Explorer (and I assume other file managers) one has full read/write access to the Public Share folder and any Shares the My Cloud administrator has configured to Public.
Obviously this is primarily an issue for those on one’s local network and not primarily a problem for remote access users since remote access generally requires one to have a MyCloud.com account to access the local My Cloud device or a Dashboard generated code for WD mobile apps.
The inability to change the Public Share folder to Private has been a common complaint since WD removed the bug in the later v4.x firmware’s Dashboard that allowed one to set the Public Share to Private in the Dashboard. (See this thread for example from earlier this year.) There is at least one method perhaps more to set the Public Share to Private via SSH but not everyone will want to wade into the SSH/Linux command line method to set the Public Share to Private. (See this link and this one and see this link for a Cloud Ideas thread requesting the ability to set the Public Share to Private.)
Because of this I can understand why someone would ask if there was a way to restrict access to the (possibly entire) My Cloud based solely on the IP address, especially if the My Cloud is used in an environment with many PC/mobile clients on the local network. As the links I posted above there are apparently ways to restrict access to both SSH and Samba based on the IP address if one wants to do so.
Edit to add: A screen capture showing a Windows 10 VM that hasn’t accessed any Private Shares yet can still access the Public Share (and from there the subfolders to read/write data within it.
