Is public FTP possible

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I’ve heard a lot of mixed things from forums and tech people at WD. What I’m wondering is if it’s possible to have public ftp for my drive? My setup is going to be many users accessing and editing files, but I wanted something a little easier to edit files with and ftp would do just that, but I’d like to access that ftp outside of the house.

All input is appreciated, thanks

2

Yes, it is possible, kind of since you will still need to give your users a username to use to log in to the FTP server.

Create a username (for example “Public”, or “Customer”, …), give access to the shares you want this user to have access to.

You have to turn on FTP in the NAS Dashboard.

Verify that your user can acces the NAS through FTP with a client like Filezilla or similar.

If the user works on your network, forward an external port (for example port 8021) to your NAS’s port 21.

You will need a DDNS service to give your router a public name and URL: [DDNSAddres}

You would then access the FTP servier through DDNSAddress:8021

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/FTP-access/m-p/614085#M921

3

Rubbish…no Linux knowledge would be necessary. Just check out the link Etupes posted.

I suspect the nightly troll LinAdmin is back again in this thread spreading misinformation.

4

Ok, my issue is that I’ve tried opening the ports on my router and using UPnP, but I can’t even access the UI remotely. I’ve used a port checker and confirmed the ports are open. I’m using ports 80 and 443 like WD suggests with no avail. I try to connect using “ftp://myexternalip:80”, but no luck. internal ftp does work though (i.e. “ftp://myinternalip”). I’ve been trying at this for months and I can usually figure these things out.

5

dcgruenig wrote:

Ok, my issue is that I’ve tried opening the ports on my router and using UPnP, but I can’t even access the UI remotely. 

You won’t be able to.  The security configuration on the internal webserver prevents access from outside your local network.  The most you should expect to see is:

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And you can’t access FTP via port 80…    Port 80 is a webserver, not an FTP server.   FTP uses port 21.

6

Well the issue then is that MyCloud doesn’t allow the use of port forwarding on port 21

7

dcgruenig wrote:

Well the issue then is that MyCloud doesn’t allow the use of port forwarding on port 21

Sure it does.  You have to do it manually on your router.

8

Do you mean port forward port 21 to the MyCloud’s internal IP from the router?

9

Correct.

10

I honestly think my router is broken, because I have tried to PF other things in the past and nothing has worked, but that’s an issue I should try to get addressed elsewhere, thanks guys.

11

But have you tried port forwarding what TonyPh12345 suggested in your earlier attempts? Because that is the correct way to make ftp work. I have ftp running on My Cloud EX2…yes, it’s not a My Cloud regular but it should be the same.

I would try to dig up the PDF manual of your router from the manufacturer’s site to see how to do port forwarding. You only need to port forward the TCP connection on port 21. Also, if you have two routers like I do, one from ISP and one your own, then you’ll need to port forward on both routers (on the ISP router to the IP of your own router and on your own router to the My Cloud) . The idea is to allow any external traffic arriving on port 21 to go straight to your My Cloud device’s port 21.

Also, the best way to achieve this is to set a fixed IP for My Cloud on your router…otherwise everytime you reboot My Cloud it could potentially get a new IP from the router it’s connected to and you’d need to update the port forwarding every time that happens. Best is to assign a fixed IP to My Cloud, then use that IP in your port forwarding rules. This will make it work even after you router or my cloud is restarted…because you’ve now tied a certain IP to My Cloud’s MAC address.