And finally it came! My LG N2B1 with 2x1TB drives. Wonderful piece of gadget in great design. I unpacked it quickly and turned it on. Everything went smooth, though the drives weren't formatted and partitioned when it arrived, but that was easily done through the Web Menu. Also, this is not what this post is about!
One of the cool things LG gives their customers is a DDNS service. They offer you a domain - your_name.lgnas.com - so you can access your NAS not just locally but globally. Just as cool as this sounds as much a pain in the ass it can be to set it up. It took me hours of googling and twice as many hours taking care of my head-aches. My problems were mostly related to port-forwarding, and therefore the guide will cover that primarily. So, here is a small guide that can hopefully help some. I can recommend canyouseeme.org while testing.
Connect to the NAS and enable DDNS. A pretty obvious step. Log into the web menu of your NAS, go to "Remote access" and enable DDNS. Here you must also choose a domain name (make it cool!) and password. Clicking enable should initiate a process, this takes a little while. After it has been enabled your (external) IP-address should be revealed. Copy this to clipboard.
Basically, you can just try to see if it works now. Open a browser and paste the IP into the address-line or type your_name.lgnas.com. Both probably gives you errors, right? If yes, read on. If no, damn, you're a lucky bastard!
So, what's the hold-up? Your connection is being blocked! We need to open up some ports by port-forwarding. This process requires changing some settings in the router, so let's go there now. In a browser type 192.168.1.1 or whatever your router's IP is. Go to port-forwarding - it's located different on different routers. On my Linksys router (WRT160N) it's a tab called "Applications and gaming".
Let's port-forward! We're gonna do 4 different ports: 21 (FTP), 80 (WEB), 9090 (FileView) and 9091 (Torrent). For each, choose a name, enter the port in both external/internal, choose both (UDP+TCP). The IP-address is the address of the NAS. Now, enable them.
Does it work now? Check the browser by entering either your external IP from before or the domain-name. If it works, hurray! If not, read on. We'll get there soon!
Basically, it should work by doing the above, given you've done everything right. So what NOW is the problem? It can be one of three. Either 1) your ISP is blocking the ports for security reasons. If you think this is the case, you must contact them and have them open the ports and can stop reading on OR 2) there is another router in your network! OR 3) Both.
Option 2 was of course my issue. I had not realized that my modem also worked as a router! My setup is a ZyXeL modem/router (wired) to a Linksys WRT160N (wireless) router. My problem was therefore, that the requests never got through to the Linksys and obviously could not forward the ports to the NAS! So basic, but yet so easy to miss. What to do is this.
Open a browser and access your OTHER router. In my case the IP was 10.0.0.1. You will be prompted for a password. Default on ZyXeL is 1234, but a much longer password had been set by my ISP (Cybercity), so I had to retrieve it from a piece of paper hidden away in a very dusty box. Anyways, when you've gotten access to the router, we must do another port-forward, so go there. Now, forward ALL ports (1-64000) to your other router. This is done by doing a port-forward range, 1 as start and 64000 as end. Now, the important thing this is getting the IP correct for the router. It is NOT 192.168... Instead, it will most likely be 10.0.0.2 or similar. Enable the port-forwarding.
Let's check the domain once again. Does it work? I really hope so, since there are no more steps in this guide. Have fun with your remote accessible NAS :)