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Stream from outside network
- Thread starter SimonBS
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I wasn't able to stream from my NAS directly to my AppleTV (even on a local network) until I had run a patchstick utility and installed alternate media viewers (XBMC/Sapphire, etc). Now I both mount NFS partitions from my NAS to the AppleTV as well as mount AFP and SMB drives to it.
Once it is working on the local network and assuming you have some sort of firewall on your network, you just have to either allow port forwarding for whichever protocol you are using from outside to your NAS (dangerous) or set up a tunnel between a computer still on the network with your NAS and either the (patchsticked) AppleTV or another computer on the network with the AppleTV (safer). It should be doable, though.
Okay, I'm a bit confused. Firstemmig and foremost, I've got no problems connecting when the Apple TV and NAS are on the same network.
I think, I'll choose the dangerous solution - atleast for now.
So, I connect to my NAS through port 2121 which is redirected to port 21 in the router at home.
So, what I should do is to allow port 2121 in the router at the "outside network"?
So you are connecting the AppleTV to a NAS over ftp (port 21) or on port 2121? This works with the stock software on an AppleTV? How is there any redirection within a single network?
What kind of router do you have? And do you have a single public IP address that uses Network Address Translation to allow multiple devices to share this address (typically, if this is the case, all of your computers and your NAS will have IP addresses similar to 192.168.x.x, 172.16.x.x, or 10.x.x.x). You have to use its port forwarding to allow connections from the outside on whatever port the AppleTV is trying to connect on (I think you are saying 2121) to map to the internal IP address of the NAS box (the 192.168.x.x, etc one) on port 21. Then the AppleTV has to be configured to use the outside address of your network (the public IP address that your computers and NAS share). This is typically set up through a web page configuration utility running on the router but Apple chose to have users run an application to configure the Apple Airport.
What kind of router do you have? And do you have a single public IP address that uses Network Address Translation to allow multiple devices to share this address (typically, if this is the case, all of your computers and your NAS will have IP addresses similar to 192.168.x.x, 172.16.x.x, or 10.x.x.x). You have to use its port forwarding to allow connections from the outside on whatever port the AppleTV is trying to connect on (I think you are saying 2121) to map to the internal IP address of the NAS box (the 192.168.x.x, etc one) on port 21. Then the AppleTV has to be configured to use the outside address of your network (the public IP address that your computers and NAS share). This is typically set up through a web page configuration utility running on the router but Apple chose to have users run an application to configure the Apple Airport.
As you say, my NAS is in a home network, where each device has an IP similar to 192.168.1.xx.
My NAS is 192.168.1.99. This IP address is forwarded to port 2121 in the router but the router will read it as 21. This is set, because I'm having several servers on my homenetwork, therefore, when connecting to the IP adresses with port 2121, my router knows what server (my NAS) I wanna connect to, and "redirects" to port 21 for FTP usage.
So my IP when connecting from outside is 91.144.xxx.xx and I wanna call port 2121.
Now, in XBMC which I have installed on the Apple TV, I wanna connect through FTP (because I'm not at home but still wanna have access and stream my media). So I fill in my IP, port, username and password to a networkconnection with the FTP protocol, but when saved in XBMC and I try to connect, I get an error.
If you are running XBMC your AppleTV has already been modified with a patchstick, so it just comes down to whether XBMC will let you use port 2121 for the ftp. It has been a while since I've connected new video sources in XBMC and I'm at work so I can't check my setup... does the ftp setup screen allow you to tell it what port you want to use? If not it will default to only use port 21 (your router would have port 21 on the outside mapped to port 21 on the inside... this is the dangerous part since anyone on the Internet will be looking for accessible devices on port 21). What is the error message you are getting?