OS X Server File Sharing - Airport Extreme Disk via VPN

Question

I have a 3 TB disk mounted on my Airport Extreme, which I can access locally just fine. However, I would like to be able to mount it over VPN outside of my network. I am able to do so with any drives on the server (internal or external), but the server application doesn't seem to recognize any drives connected via the Airport Extreme.

Is there any way to do this, or is my only option to move the drive to the server instead of the Airport Extreme?

Answer 1

I know this is an old post, but responding anyway in case people are googling for an answer still. You can access your Airport Extreme Shared Disk through a VPN from outside the network, all WITHOUT checking "Share disks over WAN". Here is hows it's done:

1. Configure your VPN server to also push the routes for your home network. Below is a sample from my macbook routing table once connected to the VPN:

Internet: 
Destination        Gateway            Flags        Refs      Use   Netif Expire
default            172.20.10.1        UGSc          15        2     en0
10.0.1/24          10.2.1.5           UGSc           0        0     utun1

As you can see, the home network traffic gets tunneled through the VPN.

2. Next step is to "Connect to server..." in Finder. You can click on "GO" in the top menu bar to get there, or hit Command-K. Once there you need to provide the url to the file share. In the case of the Airport Extreme the url should look like this:

   afp://10.0.1.1/NAME_OF_SHARE 
   OR
   smb://10.0.1.1/NAME_OF_SHARE 
   

   (replace NAME_OF_SHARE with your shared name, mine is Raid5 so the url looks like this: afp://10.0.1.1/Raid5)

3. For the username and password, provide the credentials as you normally would connect. For cases where a disk password is used instead of accounts, then the username will be "root", and the password will be the disk password.

4. All set, the share will be mounted as normal.

**NOTE: These instructions assume you are on a MAC.