Hello Im looking to be able to access my files (documents and music) away from home with out having my pc turned on. i thought i could sort out the router and tell it to point at my HDD and it would work but im not having alot of luck. i have a WRT54G linksys router and a maxtor shared storage ethernet external HDD i have just worked out how with the use of DYNDNS.com to find my dynamic ip address and update it when it changes. but not sure how to test it works. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this with the above equipment i have? i have just noticed that the HDD does not support or have any FTP stuff in it but is NAS will that help. i would be great ful of any websites or documents or any ideas anyone has.
You say you have a NAS box... what make & model is is? Every NAS solution I've ever come across has supported FTP (and quite often rsync) so all that you need to do is set port forwarding on your WRT54G and ensure you NAS has a static network address. If you have a static address, then you need to keep the dyndns record up to date, which means leaving your computer on... (Dyndns provides a small program which updates the dyndns's records as to what your current IP is). my Linksys Router (WAG54G) has a DDNS function which allows me to get my router to update dyndns's records. (its under Setup >> DDNS on my router).
My external HDD the Maxtor shared storage TrustedReviews - Maxtor Shared Storage Drive says it has a NAS server build in but no FTP server. is it the same thing? how do i find out waht port i need to open to access it? what sould i expect to see if it is done correctely? my router (linksys WRT54G) also has a DDNS updater so it will automatically update my dyndns.com forwarding ip when it changes.
OK, if your NAS devide dont have a FTP server software in it, you need to setup one in your desktop PC. Map the NAS as a network drive, then set the FTP server to point to the drive letter of that network drive. Useful infos: FTP Server Software: Filezilla FTP Port: 21
but will not mean i will have to have my PC on if i want to access files from the HDD away from home. the question was is it possible to access the external ethernet HDD with out my pc being on
I am interested to know what services are running on your NAS, would you mind providing us with a port scan of your NAS? you can download nmap from Download the Free Nmap Security Scanner for Linux/MAC/UNIX or Windows, or using this link http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-4.20-setup.exe . once you have installed nmap & winpcap (needed for nmap, comes bundled with the installer) you will need to find the IP address of your NAS, you can find this in the ARP/RARP tables in your router (for my linksys it would be - Status > Local Network >> click "ARP/RARP table) then bring up a console (click start > click run > type cmd + push enter) and enter the following code Code: nmap -sS -vv -p1-65535 IP_Address_of_NAS > C:\nmap-NAS.txt this might take awhile to run, once it has finished there will be a text file in the root of your C drive called "nmap-NAS.txt" , if you can send us a copy of that we can identify the services the NAS is offering (by the ports that are open on it)
