Port forwarding Questions

Legacy Products My Cloud OS 3
1

I managed to configure port forwarding on my MyCloud successfully.

I’m really happy with this product, however I have some questions that are still puzzling me concerning the remote access:

Question1:

What confused me initially (and this is probably what confuses most people too), is the fact that we must also configure (i.e, declare) the routers external ports also on the NAS.

Why the heck does the NAS need to know what are the routers external ports?

Shouln’t the NAS just listen/respond on 80 and 443 to whatever comes in?

I have several other services on my network that I can access from the outside (example, IP cameras, FTP servers, web servers, etc) - All I have to do is forward an external port to the internal port on those servers (this is just done on the router). These servers don’t have to be aware of the NAT translation that is done on the router.

Why does the NAS need this information?

Like I said I can access my NAS remotely but I was just wondering why the NAS needs to be aware of the routers external ports being used. Does anybody know why?

Question 2:

For remote access to MyCloud NAS device there’s seems to be no DNS name address resolution (I don’t login to my DDNS name on those external ports). In fact I must login to WDMyCloud.com with my email address and password credentials.

So there seems to be some sort of relaying done here. This is probably necessary in order to let the WD servers know my external IP address and the external ports I configured. WD servers then relay the connection to my external IP address on those external ports.

Is this how it works? If so then it probably answers my first question.

Anyway, is it possible to bypass the WD servers completely?

Question 3:

Is it possible to remotely open my shares and files using File Explorer. How can I map a network drive when I access my NAS remotely?

 

2

Q1. The nas needs to know the external ports because it’s sitting behind the router. No device behind router or firewall knows your network external ip or opened ports unless your router is on DMZ mode (dangerous unless you know what you’re doing). Your other devices use upnp service from the router to map the ports automatically. Same goes for the nas. If those device doesn’t support upnp, the you’ll need to map the ports manually.

Q2. WD cater this device for those who even doesn’t know networking. So they don’t need to know the DNS. When you login to wdmycloud.com, it already has the info of the nas that you registered via the dashboard like ip/port to connect to. There’s no relay unless somehow the device determined you need the openvpn relay if it’s not able to connect directly.

Q3. Yes but it’s not supported and modifications needed. Search my post reply in this forum about webdav. You’re better off port forwarding the sftp or ftp.