File Sharing with Airport Extreme ... or not

[tobywonkanobe]

I purchased an Airport Extreme router to be able to add a disk to it and share files with Macs and PCs over my LAN and over WAN. We have never gotten it to work. Apple tells me that it works but they cannot emulate my situation and suggests I hire an Apple certified consultant to fix the problem. They came in and told me that it's a Comcast modem problem and that I should contact Comcast. Comcast said they do not support 3rd party hardware and they could not help.

My teams are very talented but not super tech savvy. We are currently afp file sharing on an older machine but cannot get the promised Windows file sharing to work. LAN Yes, WAN Yes, AFP Yes, SMB No.

We tried a Synology server but it's implementation of AFP is DooDoo. Very slow and no indexing. Takes a week for a team member to see contents of a directory.

I cannot be the only person in the world that want's to share files from a disk attached to an Airport Extreme over WAN using Comcast.

Tired of Apple, Comcast and Consultants pointing the finger at each other with a retail product that claims to be able to share files over WAN to Macs and PCs.

If someone has solid answers, I would appreciate any help.

 

[Altemose]

@tobywonkanobe What modem do you have? The disk that you are trying to use is only the one attached to the AirPort and not the Synology, correct? I am a certified network technician that installed an AirPort network at my school for my Eagle Scout project so I know my way around the hardware. I can help you get everything configured over TeamViewer, if you would like.

 

[tobywonkanobe]

We worked on it this afternoon with my neighbor/network god and determined that the port that should be open for smb into my AE is not.

@tobywonkanobe What modem do you have? The disk that you are trying to use is only the one attached to the AirPort and not the Synology, correct? I am a certified network technician that installed an AirPort network at my school for my Eagle Scout project so I know my way around the hardware. I can help you get everything configured over TeamViewer, if you would like.

Yes, the disk I want to use is attached to the AE. We had my neighbor/network guru here with Comcast and they determined that the SMB port is NOT open on the AE regardless of what Apple says. We still can't access the shared drive directly through WAN SMB but used the VPN on the Synology to access it on my LAN.

Have you been able to access the shared drive on the AE through SMB from a PC?

 

[Altemose]

@tobywonkanobe The AirPort supports SMB over WAN. However, SMB is one of the most often attacked ports and therefore a lot of ISPs have blocked that type of functionality. Therefore, what modem do you use and is the AirPort in Bridge Mode?

 

[tobywonkanobe]

We had the Comcast guy sitting right there and he checked which ports were not blocked. We pretty much determined that it was AE that did not open the port.

We started off with a SMC modem/router and ended up with Netgear. Business Comcast does not allow us to use our own modem. The Comcast guy said all was passed through. Net Guru said he knocked on the AE on 445 and the door was closed.

AE in bridge mode? No. SMC and Netgear in Bridge mode? Comcast guy said that it was as bridged as it could be but not all the way.

Does that make sense?

 

[Altemose]

@tobywonkanobe We have this exact same rig at my school. There are a couple of different ways to configure it but the Comcast rep was correct in saying that there is no true bridge mode on these gateways. I assume Comcast does it to prevent business customers from taking a lot of public IPs. The way I do it is to configure a static setup on the AirPort and then use the demilitarized zone on the Comcast gateway. If you would like, I can give you a hand getting it configured over TeamViewer as I work with this setup all the time.

 

[tobywonkanobe]

@tobywonkanobe We have this exact same rig at my school. There are a couple of different ways to configure it but the Comcast rep was correct in saying that there is no true bridge mode on these gateways. I assume Comcast does it to prevent business customers from taking a lot of public IPs. The way I do it is to configure a static setup on the AirPort and then use the demilitarized zone on the Comcast gateway. If you would like, I can give you a hand getting it configured over TeamViewer as I work with this setup all the time.

@Altemose Sounds like fun! What do I have to lose. Pick a time and day and I will share with your teamViewer or we have join.me.