How to open firewall ports so I can connect to my NAS via WebDav or FTP?

[ajtatum]

Hi,

I tried setting up NextCloud on a VPS and added the add-on for External Storage, but it was unable to connect to my Synology NAS. The same goes for other applications as well. So, it seems like the ports are being blocked by ufw. Typically, I disable UFW and use the hosting provider's firewall (Vultr or Digital Ocean).

I was thinking of just setting up Cloudron on my Synology, but Synology uses ports 80 & 443 to serve as a reverse proxy for the apps installed on it.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
AJ

[girish]

@ajtatum Cloudron will disable UFW as well.

I am confused about your idea to install on Synology though. Cloudron only installs on Ubuntu 18.04/20.04. Are you think of a VM inside synology to install Cloudron ? Cloudron also requires port 443 as well, we don't support other ports. As for opening ports in Cloudron VM, see https://docs.cloudron.io/networking/#whitelist-ports

[ajtatum]

@girish Sorry, what I mean is, basically, I want my Synology to be the "data center" for apps like Next Cloud. I don't want docs stored on my Vultr server, but rather stored on Synology through either the WebDav, (S)FTP(S) protocols, etc. My Synology does a lot of things already and hosts a lot of things, but some applications are tough to install and get going... nextcloud being one of them for some reason. In addition, I don't have the BEST Synology (720+ with 6gb RAM) so, with it having Plex and a slew of other services, it simply doesn't have all the resources to host all the applications I want... but it most definitely has the space to do so.

So, the Cloudron apps would need to be able to communicate to my Synology over specific ports. I've picked random port numbers for pretty much everything, so it can't be whatever WebDav's standard port is or FTP port, etc.

When I tried to mount a shared folder from my Synology on NextCloud hosted through Cloudron, I just received a standard "could not connect". However, I know it works as my WordPress, hosted on Vultr in the same VPC using the same firewall, backs up to my Synology via WebDav... so, to me, it seems that it's either NextCloud or the way the Cloudron server is configured.

[mehdi]

@ajtatum Cloudron's firewall only blocks incoming connections, not outgoing ones, so it should not in any way interfere with this kind of setup.

You could try mounting a Volume in the Cloudron dashboard directly, instead of inside nextcloud.

[girish]

@ajtatum said in How to open firewall ports so I can connect to my NAS via WebDav or FTP?:

When I tried to mount a shared folder from my Synology on NextCloud hosted through Cloudron, I just received a standard "could not connect".

I assume you are configuring this inside nextcloud using the external storage app ? As @mehdi said, Cloudron does not block outbound connections, so I am thinking the issue is something else and not Cloudron firewall related.

[ajtatum]

@mehdi That sounds like a good idea! I need to investigate that, as I easily mounted Vultr's block storage and made it accessible to other apps. If I can mount it through Cloudron and then have NextCloud access it that way, I'd be one happy person! LOL

[ajtatum]

@girish & @mehdi - thanks for your advice! It gave me the idea to Tailscale. I installed it on the Cloudron server and was able to successfully mount a shared folder from my Synology using cifs. However, even though the data persists between reboots, I don't see the data on the Synology, even when I'm logged in as the root user. I'm not quite the linux expert, but I noticed that when I changed Nextcloud's appdata folder to point to the mount, it created it as a "root" user. On the Synology, I created a Cloudron user that has the necessary permissions and I mounted the shared folder with the Cloudron user, password, and domain. So, I'm thinking this has something to do with user IDs not matching up or something like that.

I'm nervous about moving forward since I can't actually see the data on my Synology. Would you or anyone else have any advice?

By the way, this is how I mounted it:
sudo mount -t cifs -o credentials=/etc/nas-credentials,vers=3.0 //nas/Cloudron /mnt/nas

In fstab, the command is:
//nas/Cloudron cifs -o credentials=/etc/nas-credentials,vers=3.0,_netdev,auto 0 0

Thanks for all your help!