FTP forwarding questions from a beginner

RouterOS General
1

Hello!

I apologize ahead of time as I am relatively new to Networking and unfortunately have been left to the fires of my predecessor that left no documentation. It’s taken a while but I finally have a grasp on the system at hand. I am not too familiar with using CLI so I’ve been doing everything via winbox.

Currently running on a RB4011iGS+ on version 7.7 from Jan/12/2023.

The situation at hand is that I have a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra that I am trying to access via FTP using Filezilla from a remote client. The challenge is that the NAS is located on a separate subnet connected to a switch in Ether06. Ether01 is our main for ISP.

Ether 01 is on x.x.254.x
Ether 06 is on x.x.100.x

From here I went to winbox, IP, firewall, NAT and add a new NAT.

What I have done in the general tab: chain dstnat, dst address the public ip, protocol tcp, dst port 21

I have in the action tab: dst-nat, to staticIP of NAS, to ports 21.

when I try to connect to the NAS from remote client, I get an error in connection, but I am able to dial into it via the LAN.

I feel like I am missing something but honestly I don’t have any idea. Outside of the accept winbox, there are no other firewall rules in place at the moment.

Thank you so much and I hope to learn as much as I can from everyone!

2

Besides port 21, you have to forward a range of ports for passive mode. Depends on the FTP server and how that is configured.
But to be honest…FTP is like legacy. Please consider a different approach instead of FTP, or make it available to the outside world through VPN.

3

Thank you so much, I did some research and saw that the NAS also needed port 55536-55563 so I added that to the dst port with port 21 and still had no success. I’ll be looking into the VPN option as well but really would like to have this figured out.

Thank you again for your help, i’ll keep plugging away at it.