QNAP TurboNAS Firmware: 3.5 Deep Dive Part Five: Remote Access

Here are the port assignments that the NAS wants to use:

Next step is to turn on the service that you want to access the internet:

TurboNAS applies your settings:

It confirms your results:

Make sure to click on Download Access URL’s as the exact URL’s with port numbers are all in one spot to make remote access easier to use.  Then, click Finish.

Next, click on ConfigureMyCloudNAS to configure reset the password.  Enter a password in the proper field and click Apply.

Next, click on Manage Users and enable users to log in as follows:

Click Apply.  I now show three approved remote access users!

I already have a Windows Home Server on my network, so if I don’t shut off remote access on the home server, these links will bring up my home server remote access page.  Being able to manually specify ports would be a great addition to the configuration utility.

In order to properly test the situation where there is not already another device open to remote access on the network, I put a NAS onto a friend’s network and reconfigured the remote access.  I was able to get the remote access capability to work fine with a clean network.

Conclusion

I’ve grown very used to having rock-solid remote access with my Windows Home Server, so having this capability in TurboNAS would be very important to me going forward as I use it all the time to grab documents and files from the road.  QNAP makes it easy to set up a remote access capability on their NAS units, but if you already have another device using the ports allocated by TurboNAS, you may have some issues with getting it to work properly.  I  like the fact that it handled the router UPNP setup automatically, but would also like the ability to manually specify ports used to enable the NAS devices to play nicely with other remote access devices on the network.