connecting to hard drive via internet

Question

I have a network hard drive on my network at home. It is a very simple network, it consists of a wireless router and modem and a wireless hard drive. Of course there are often also laptops connected but that is not important in my question....

I want to know how i can connect to my hard drive over the internet when I am somewhere else in the world or even connected to my neighbours internet. Are there special components that I require or can it be done just like that. I know a fair bit about ip address and networks, this is just my next level

Can someone help me out?

Answer 1

(https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1792838?start=0&tstart=0)

Perhaps this thread helps?

If your Time Capsule (TC) is configured to be your Internet router, then you only need to do two things to allow access to it from the Internet:

o Using AirPort Utility, enable both the "Enable file sharing" and the "Share disks over Ethernet WAN port" options on the utility's Disks > File Sharing page. o On the utility's Summary page, note the value of IP Address. This will be the TC's WAN-side IP address.

To access the TC from the Internet, use Finder's Connect to Server option and enter afp://TC's WAN-side IP address in the Server Address box, and then, click on Connect.

I have no idea what the windows / linux version of afp would be.

Answer 2

This can really vary based on the configuration of your network. Is the drive that you're connecting a SAN (meaning that it's plugged into the ethernet port)? Or, does the hard drive hook up to a USB port on your router? Depending on the router, if you've used the usb configuration, you may or may not be able to do this. With a SAN, you'll want to make sure that the appropriate ports are open on the router and point to the IP address of the SAN. Keep in mind that this is not secure and raises a lot of security risks.

I have a similar configuration, but the shared drive is connected to a computer. I do not have any holes/port forwards on my firefall, but rather use Hamachi VPN to establish the connections to the computer. With Hamachi, it will first establish an outgoing request to a server and create a secure VPN link between the two computers with Hamachi. From here you're able to do the file sharing.