Question How to hook up a remote FTP sever on ZTE F660 router ?

[Amithnal]

Hi,
I need bit of help configuring my router. I have being trying to hook up a nas to my fibre. I connected a hard drive and made my ip public. but still my port forwarding doesn't work. Please help me out.

 

[bill001g]

In many cases you can't portfoward to the the routers LAN IP. It may let you put in the rule but it doesn't actually work. I never could tell but I think it is because the router lan address itself can not pass through the NAT and go to the internet because the LAN does not have a default route/gateway on it. The reason I remember this restriction was someone was asking how you would add it on a router running DD-WRT firmware and it was done with a commands rather than a menu. This was many years ago though.

I most cases there is a option on a router to allow remote access from the internet.....tends to be risky so it is off by default. Many also have similar check boxes to allow remote configuration or even ping commands. In these cases you can just use the router wan IP and it will work without any port forwarding. From a quick look at your router manual I do not see these options.

My next question is why you are using port 444. The router likely runs on other ports which brings up a new problem. The router either runs in active mode using port 20 and 21 but the router on the client not your router needs a port forward rule for 21. To solve this most servers support passive mode...no way to know if your router does or does not. Now you need port 20 forwarding in addition to a random port generated by the server for the end client to send the data on. Maybe you could get this to work with triggered rules but your router does not appear support it.
This mess would be why a router would allow direct FTP access via the WAN port.

Your router may not allow it because FTP as implemented on your router is completely unsecured. It runs every including the password in the clear with no encryption. FTP servers are never run this way any longer they all use some form of secure FTP like SFTP OR FTPS. So even if you could make the port forwarding work I wouldn't do it.

The best option likely is to just give up and use one of the many free cloud hosting services....even these do not support a non encrypted form of FTP.

You only other option is going to find a router that supports a secure FTP server or other method of sharing data but this is going to be hard because of the fiber connection in your router. Maybe consider building a server since you were going to use a router to do this which has a low power cpu maybe a raspberry pi device. There are examples of how to setup a secure FTP server but I have never looked at the details. These need a simpler form of port forwarding and it would reside on a actual lan ip

 

[Alabalcho]

Apart from being insecure, there's another problem with FTP protocol. Try setting "passive" mode on your FTP client.

Check whether your router supports VPN server. Then you just VPN into your router, and access your NAS as you'd be connected on the LAN/WiFi.