Help needed to configure AEBS Air Disk for remote access by PC

[danbamford]

Hi Forum People,

I am hoping someone may be able to help me out. Here is the lowdown.

I currently have a airport express hooked up to my ADSL MODEM. The airport express connects to my AEBS wirelessly. My AEBS has several USB HDD connected via a powered USB hub.

All HDDs are available wirelessly over the LAN from both Mac and PC.

I have turned on share drives over internet on the AEBS and opened port 548 on the MODEM firewall.

I can access all USB drives over the internet via my mac.

My problem is I do not know how to connect to the drives over the internet from a windows based computer.
My questions are:
how to I connect to these drives from a windows based computer?
do I need to open other ports for windows to access these drives?
has anyone out there been able to get this to work?

I would be greatful for any assistance you could give.

Thanks
Dan

 

[RMo]

If the devices were connected directly to the AirPort that is connected to the Internet, you might be able to get it to work (without Apple's utility, even) by going to Start > Run and typing \\your.ip.address.here, for example \\123.45.67.89. This is the IP address of your router (the one your ISP assigns to your device), not any private IP addresses on your network. If you need help figuring this out, feel free to ask! This should then bring up a Windows Explorer window listing all devices (printers and HDs) on the AirPort.

But ... since your setup seems to have them connected to another device, I'm not sure how this will work. I think you'll need to configure port forwarding on the device directly connected to the Internet and forward drive-sharing ports to the IP address of the device to which your drives are connected. (In AirPort Utility, click the Advanced toolbar button and go to the "Port Assignment" tab.) Alas, I don't know what ports AirPort uses for AirDisk (the one you mentioned is used for sharing your computer's home directory and may or may not be the same) or if you'd even need to do this (they may just act as one giant, friendly wireless network and it might not matter which physical device it's connected to).

Well, I guess that wasn't too helpful. But hopefully you can try playing around a bit and seeing if you can get it to work (I have experience only with the first scenario, not the second which appears to be yours). Good luck!

 

[danbamford]

Hi RMo,

Thanks for the reply. I tried opening port 80 (http) and port 21 (ftp) on my router and forwarded them to my AEBS IP address. To get it to work for the mac I only had to open the mac port so I thought it would be worth a go.

I think this made some difference as now I get a (104) Connection reset by peer error message. I have googled the message and it seems that it is basically saying that I am not authorized to access. I imagine this is good as I do want to control access but it does not ask for a username or password!

Any more ideas?

Oh yeah - I don't think it is an issue the AEBS being downstream of the AE as it is set up to extend the AE network meaning it is actually a member of the AE network.