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Share disks over WAN for Windows

I spent a lot of time searching through the forum to find the solution for my problem but I could not seem to find the concrete solution for it. Hence, I'm asking for help.

Problem description:
I can't access my USB drives connected to the Airport Extreme over the WAN from Windows XP. However, it's working fine with my Mac.

My Configuration:
+ Airport Extreme firmware version 7.2
+ 3 USB drives connected to the Airport Extreme via the USB hub
Using the AirPort Utility, I have configured the followings.
+ On the Airport/Base Station tab, I have enabled "Allow configuration over Ethernet WAN port" and "Advertise configuration globally using Bonjour"
+ On the Disks/File Sharing tab, I have enabled "Enable file sharing" with accounts options (and I have created different user accounts). I also enabled "Share disks over Ethernet WAN port" and "Advertise disks globally using Bonjour"
+ On the Advanced/Bonjour tab, I have enabled "Use a wide-area hostname"
+ I also registered my dynamic IP address at home with DynDNS

My Observations:
+ At home (this means locally), I can access all the drives from all of my machines including, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac Mini, PowerBook.
+ Outside of home (this means over the (WAN), either at work or at my friend's house, I still can access all the drives from my PowerBook. However, I CANNOT access any of the drives from any Windows machines.

My Understanding:
+ On Mac, it uses AFP protocol for file sharing and this is working fine locally or over the WAN.
+ On PC, it uses CIFS protocol for file sharing and Airport Extreme seems to have issue with this over the WAN.

Help!!!
If anyone has found a working solution and has tried it yourself and you know it works, please post the solution with detail steps. Your help will be highly appriciated. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who has this issue.

Thanks

Posted on Sep 6, 2007 12:56 PM

Reply
24 replies

Jan 2, 2008 10:59 PM in response to jetspeedz

What error do you get?

Have you tried with just "\\x.x.x.x" without the extra slash and drive letter.

\\x.x.x.x seems to work for me.

For whatever reason this forum is removing my 2 slashes.

So what I mean is to try without the ending slash and the drive letter.

Also since some people think the ISP is blocking those ports. Check and see if you can telnet to ports 138 and 139 (SMB Ports) to see if those ports are being blocked.

Message was edited by: TreMac

Jan 2, 2008 10:55 PM in response to TreMac

i can connect out to others who are sharing their drive and are not behind a ISP firewall..

it turns out Road runner blocks port 445 along with others... no way around this. this is a Bin file thats loaded into the cable modem as soon as its put on the ISP network... no way around it unless i get a business account... really ****** about this.. im going to have a chat with them again in the morning..

Jan 6, 2008 5:42 PM in response to solito

I have found some software such as PC MacLan that is a very simple and light software that will install on XP and will connect via AFP-apple filing protocal. However this software does not work for Vista.

Anyone here familiar with AFP clients and know of any small software that will serve this purpose for Vista?

What a pain in the ***... these windows file sharing ports are blocked by 95% of ISP's in the USA

Share disks over WAN for Windows

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