NAS Box Build and Free Remote Access

Hi,
I want to install a freeNas box. Is there any free way of giving some users access to the data over the internet. Preferably, an option such as the one that synology offers for clients to access files remotely. So far, I have read about VPN and SSH options. I cant use VPN because I cant afford a dedicated public IP or any of the paid dynamic DNS services. I cant use SSH because the users cant use it as needed.
Also can you suggest a hardware build with similar or less budget as the FreeNas Mini box from iXSystems?

Thanks in advance.

you could setup a VPN using dynamic DNS through no-ip.org free. the only restriction is you have to re-certify every month.

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Another option would be to use ZeroTier with FreeNAS. This way it would not matter if you IP or their IP changed, ZeroTier works by adding a second network interface with a private IP on each system.

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If you can afford a cheap domain you can setup CloudFlare as nameserver and update your IP via API. You can setup the updating process on pfSense for example.

Zerotier with freenas best option… but one problem i faced i dont know the solution everytime i boot freenas i have to join the network

Thank you all for the response. I will test the suggestions and revert. Regards

@beagle

What is best way to update Cloudflare with IP address. I’m currently going through opendns which then notifies cloudflare since freenas doesn’t have this capability currently. FreeNAS uses a package known as inadyn which is their dynamic update client. The new upcoming release of FreeNAS 11.3 will include version 2.5 of inadyn. Unfortunately the cloudflare api stuff was added in pre-release or beta 2.6. I tested out 2.6 and it works great to access Cloudflare directly. I asked FreeNAS folks if they would include 2.6 rather than 2.5 – their response with 2.5 was the version they are going with and recommended I go through OpenDNS to update cloudflare. I’m wondering if you have another method. Kind of sucks.

I’m afraid I’ve never set dynamic DNS up on FreeNAS only on routers and I’m currently running it on pfSense.

Can’t you run the dynamic DNS on your router? If you need to run it on FreeNAS maybe you can run a script in a iocage or a VM on Behyve.

@beagle
Yes I’m running it too on my pfsense build – however I rarely if at all ever see an update. I external IP hardly changes however I thought the dns updater clients “called home” every few days even in the absence of a change. Maybe I’m looking at the pfsense logs wrong, however I don’t see really any DUC activity

The script seems to run every 24hs. It shows on the General log.

Status > System Logs > System > General

@beagle
Hey thanks for pointing that out to me. I guess the dynamic update client was running – however since there was no change of external IP address it wasn’t calling home to the respective services.

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So we settled for a Synology DS918+ after some considerations. My requirements got updated to setting up a site to site VPN rather.
I tried the zerotier setup though. The clients got added to the network but i couldn’t reach them. At first i thought i could use their actual LAN IPs but i later realized i had to use the Zerotier adapter’s IPs to reach them. I still couldn’t reach them through that. On the firewall, I have opened up only 9993 for zerotier. Could that be a problem? I have had some issues on my network before and leaving only specific ports opened solved it so I am quite careful about what I keep opened.

Finally got Zerotier to work properly. I changed the open-9993-port rule on destination to source. I got to do some really interesting things with it over the weekend. Thanks to Tom for the introduction.