A year or so ago I asked the Dope about setting up remote access to our NAS device (original thread here). The replies were great, but I still haven’t found the time to follow up the leads and do the requisite learning. We’re about to start a bit of travelling at the end of the week, and we’d really like to have our files accessible … but if I haven’t really gotten to it in a year, I’m certainly not going to be able to get to it in a few days. What to do?
What about services such as Symantec’s **PC Anywhere **or GoToMyPC? If I can install software on my desktop that will let me remotely log in and control it (safely and securely), won’t I be able to access the entire network (including the NAS) and copy files as needed?
Or given that we’re most likely to transfer files, would the DDNS be the better way to go? Do I post in the Marketplace and ask a Doper to do it for me (e.g. go to our dyn.com account, set things up there then walk me through the settings on our router/NAS)?
Something I haven’t thought of?
Thanks,
I’ve never looked into more formal remote access such as you describe - but for selected files, something like Dropbox can be quite useful. You have to store the files in question in a specific directory (or establish a shortcut there that points to their true location).
Once they’re in the Dropbox folder, you can use / edit them from any computer that has Dropbox installed on it. Smartphones can also use them.
Basically, if you make a change to a document, it gets picked up and replicated to the Dropbox server, then other devices replicate it down “automagically”.
I’ve found it quite useful for things I might need to have access to on the fly - for example I’m keeping my Girl Scout Cookie spreadsheet there (so I can get to it from my laptop or the desktop at home).
Anyway - it might not be what you need, but it’s an easy (and free, for up to 2 gig or so) option.
:smack: just remembered that PCAnywhere just got hacked. Have they fixed it?
I’ve toyed with Dropbox for a few other things, but we have several hundred GB that we may need access to. There’s no telling if a client is going to want artwork or a chapter rewrite for a book we did five years ago. Barring a traumatic crash, we won’t be pulling that much, but we don’t know what we’ll need–hence the comfort level of being able to access it all.
For crashes and other emergencies, we’ll be leaving behind three ready-to-ship FedEx boxes with different hard drives in them–system image files, etc. But that’s a last-resort kind of thing.
Bumping out of quiet desperation (it’s the Doper way).
GoToMyPC needs the machine to be on and awake for the entire time. The NAS is always listening and wakes when needed, not sure I want to leave my PC in the same state for a few weeks.
The PC does have a Wake on LAN setting in the BIOS, but I’ve never used it. I assume I’d have to have some sort of DDNS setup anyway to get to the machine from the Internet, so that’s probably not an option.
For this specific trip, could you just burn everything to DVD-ROMs and bring with? Obviously it would be nice if you could get the remote access working as a longer-term solution, but if you can’t figure anything better before the end of the week…
Rhythmdvl, the issue is that you have left it very late to do anything.
Your NAS is limited - the options seem to be CIFS (file sharing) and FTP. Neither of these protocols are usable over the internet without some assistance from your router (and more than that given by DDNS). They are also not particularly secure.
Your DDNS account and config let you find your router from the internet - they work together to give your router a name and keep the IP address associated with that name current. But your router is a (mostly) one way connection - it makes all the devices inside your home network (with private, non-internet IP addresses) look like the single actual internet IP address that is given to your router.
When you want to go the other way, from the internet to an internal address, you need to do some work. You need to tell the router that specific internet traffic needs to transferred (forwarded) to the intended internal recipient. This is known as pinholing or port-forwarding. It sets up your router with a socket (port) that gets passed to the internal device and it’s required port. It is pretty easy to do if you choose the default options, but those options will not provide much security. The secure options are much harder to work out.
I can give you a guide to the easy option, but it can only be done from inside your network, and you will not be generally secure. Anyone from outside who looks (and they do, all the time) will see the possibility of accessing your data and will try to do so.
Thanks so much for helping me understand the situation.
Here’s what I’m hearing:
Making the NAS–DDNS–Internet connection can be fairly straightforward, but its defaults are unsecure. Changing the defaults to lock things down isn’t straightforward and takes both time and learning—and further time and attention to keep it secure. This is pretty much what kept me from acting on the old thread.
Any opinion on the GoToMyPC route? If I understand that correctly, their proprietary software sits on my machine basically acts as a DDNS. Well, it doesn’t act as one but their servers do. The app sits resident when I’m away and keeps their servers updated with my IP address. It uses an already-open port (e.g. 80) so there are no configuration worries there. All security is handled by their app and their servers.
The only downside is that I need to change my power settings to be sure that the machine doesn’t shut itself off/sleep/hibernate while we’re away.
Given the broader functionality (anything my PC can do plus its access to the network), this seems like the preferable route.
You have pretty much got it - applications like GoToMyPC and PCAnywhere use a technique called NAT Traversal to establish connections via a central server. It does avoid the need to set up port-forwarding. But you do need to keep your PC on while you are away.
For accessible files the remote PC solutions are good. If you are uploading your 8GB camera memory card every few days as it fills up, maybe you should look at internet storage like dropbox, since you may not have the best internet connection at home for high volumes.
This is pretty much what the Pogoplug is made for. I think you just plug the NAS into the Pogoplug and all your files will be available at pogoplug.com. I own two of them, but I wiped out the Pogoplug software and installed Linux on them instead so I’ve never actually used their service, but it looked pretty slick.
Well that was pretty interesting. I went with GoToMyPC’s trial period. Easy installation. Sitting at my desk I connected my laptop through the DSL connection (the desktop and main network are on cable) and just as easily as it installed I was looking at my desktop … next to my desktop. I created files on both and transferred them back and forth. Things got a bit surreal when I went back to the desktop (after disconnecting) and browsed to GoTo via a virtual Linux machine. Again it connected without a hitch—and saw infinity.
The main reason behind this is to make travel as stressless as possible. There are several other steps we’ve taken, but this is the final piece. For a variety of reasons we don’t want to carry the entire contents of our office with us; this lets us breath that much easier if we need to access a project we didn’t plan on working on or if we forgot a key file. Further, its live-ness means we won’t have to synch with a backup drive every time we head out.
Pogoplug looks interesting. Our NAS has USB ports, so it should connect … but it’s a bit vague. Is it a box you put hard drive in and it allows connections or is it a non-storage device that would allow access to whatever it’s connected to?
This. It’s a little box about the size of a fat router. It has a cat5 and 4 usb plugs on it. Plug it into the router to give it internet access and it has a service on board that contacts pogoplug.com. You plug the NAS into a usb port and go to pogoplug.com, set up a free account, maybe change a few settings, and you should be able to access the NAS online. I’m pretty sure that’s how they work. Like I said, I installed linux on them and never actually used their service.
Since you mentioned Linux, you might like playing with a pogoplug, although they’re don’t have displays and have to be controlled over ssh. They’re basically small computers, mine have a 1.2GHz processor and 256MB ram, but they’re an older version which my local Best Buy keeps in stock for some reason. Debian can be installed on a flash drive plugged into them, but I wiped out the pogoplug stuff in the process. I think you can use both linux and their service together if you do it right. Mine act as a media server to serve movies and things on the TV, and run some scripts and programs and other automated things that I used to leave my desktop on for. For $50 or less, they’re pretty darn powerful and useful.
The PogoPlug looks like a nice device, but it only cloudshares directly attached storage (i.e. via USB, eSATA), and will not cloudshare Network Attached storage (which would be preferable in this case). It is a cloud-available NAS, in effect (without any RAID capability). It does handle the details of bypassing NAT and maintaining access from the internet, though.
I’ve done the remote control into infinity thing (just last week, setting up a corporate network remote control solution remotely, huh). It’s fun, but I always worry about increasing memory use to infinity and beyond (or at least until the swap file gets full or the network saturates).
Since it’s a functional computer, shouldn’t plugging it in to a NAS device’s USB port work? I’ve always moved files around via an office PC; never had the occasion to experiment with the port (the NASs are tucked away in different corners of the basement in the semi-deluded notion that if we get robbed they’ll unlikely to be among the booty).
I ended up with 18 GB of RAM in my desktop machine. I recently got hooked on VMs in a combination of advice as to what I can do with that stupid amount of RAM and the idea that I can make browsing safer. So when we get back, I’m donning my maddest scientist’s goggles, and hosting a Linux machine which will host an OSX (if I can get it to run), which will then host a Win XP box. I’ll then ramp up the turbo entabulator and see if I can’t ‘install’ GTMPC on several of them, and see what happens. If the Hadron Collider goes all higgledy-piggledy again, you’ll know who to blame.
Actually, I just want to see if I can use up all that RAM.
…
So I’ve connected to my PC via a laptop on our second broadband line, same with the Mac, from a virtual machine inside the PC, and now from a tablet (also connected to the second network). By putting both Mac and PC system backups on the NAS, it seems like we’ll be just short of impervious on our travels. HDDs to start with, USB flash drives with critical data files as carry with-us backups, accessible images of our machines in case we need to replace the entire computer on the road, and … and we’re leaving pre-paid FedEx shipping boxes and detailed instructions behind in case everything (including the desktop) goes belly up and we’ll have the backup NAS within a day.
My plan is to upgrade my current server (a small old linux box with 1Gb RAM) to a multicore system with 24-32Gb RAM, set up a VM management suite and virtualize the server, our laptops and anything else I want to play with. That way, the device we hold (laptop, tablet, smartphone, any other computer) is also an access device for the virtual systems running on my server at home. With good backups and some sync tools, I think I can get reliable mobile/local computing from wherever we are, and global file access if we can get on the internet.
Good for you, Rythmdvl, for getting it all to work… but what a terrible way to travel! Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation or something and not constantly worrying about your files?
PS - You might want to turn off automatic updates and such so your computer doesn’t try to update itself, crash something in the process, and remain inaccessible for the rest of your trip.