My friend and I are attempting to back up to identical LS-CHLs to each other, over the internet, with both Linkstations behind NAT'd routers.
It is my understanding (and to my astonishment) that the REMOTE Linkstation reports its LOCAL IP address, and therefore my local LS will never be able to back up to it. To make this more clear...
My LS is trying to back up to my friend's LS.
The "Public" WAN IP address of his router is 123.123.123.123
The "Local" LAN IP address of his LS is 192.168.1.23
On his router we have forwarded all 3 necessary ports to his LS (192.168.1.23)
The same is true of my setup. Exact same thing (except obviously the IP addresses vary).
I then go to "Add a Linkstation," and give it his "public" IP (123.123.123.123) and my LS correctly sees his LS and adds it to my list.
However, in my list his LS is reported as having the IP address 192.168.1.23. That is the "private," local IP of his LS !!! It needs to be his PUBLIC IP the same one I gave my LS and the same one it used to initially query his LS.
But now my LS can do nothing more because it is trying to connect to an incorrect IP address. I can not use the LS to LS backup feature.
Can someone from Buffalo please finally confirm this is the intended behavior (and in my mind horrible design choice) of the LS and provide a workaround? Buffalo claims to support remote LS to LS backups but how many people have a second, separate public IP address to assign to their LS? My guess is less than 1%. So how are the other 99% of is suppossed to use this feature?
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. And if I am mistaken about anything I have said, I apologize in advance.
If you set up a VPN to between both locations you can use the local feature.
What ports have you opened?
"If you set up a VPN to between both locations you can use the local feature.
What ports have you opened?"
I'm not trying to use the local feature. Buffalo says that a REMOTE backup feature is available
My issue is that the remote backup relies on the Linkstation's LOCAL IP address. Which makes REMOTE backups nearly impossible.
It would be like Ford selling a car and saying that it can go 300 mph. Then you buy it and find out in order to get this "feature" you need to have a nitrous system installed. Not many people have a nitrous system laying around.
Buffalo says I can do a remote backup, I buy it and find out I have to pay to have a second cable run to my house so I can put the linkstation on its own public IP address? That seems a little crazy, right?
Per Buffalo's instructions, I've got ports (tcp) 22939, 873, 8873 forwarded to my Linkstation.
Other than the 2nd IP address, if the only way I can actually use the remote backup is a VPN, can you provide instructions on how I would do that?
Wow, this describes the exact same problems I'm having!
Just bought a Quad Linkstation for the Office and a Linkstation Mini for my remote office at home. Right out of the box I upgraded the firmware on the min (1.03 to 1.06)--the Quad was already on the latest firmware.
I setup all the ports on both Routers and can add each device using it's corresponding Public IP address but the list then shows the LOCAL LAN IPs which of course are behind NAT. When I go to add a backup job the remote shares do not appear in the destination list whatsoever. Why in the world would they change the list of linked NAS devices to their private IP LAN address immediately after entering the Public IP address and adding it to the list of NAS devices to be backed up? Something is seriously wrong with whoever the hell coded this software.
I planned on rolling out the Linkstation Mini's to all our remote users to sync back to the Quad at the main office. Huge problem if these have to tunnel through some sort of VPN. I'm extremely pissed as I even called tech support to make sure this scenario would work and was told it would as long as I opened the ports and had public IPs.
Let me conclude by saying I'm an IT Manager for an Austin based Engineering company and I'm seriously thinking about driving over to their office here in Austin to find out what is going on. I agree with the original poster of this thread--these items are being sold as capable of remote backup between each other and I honestly don't see why it shouldn't work with today's technologies, barring the problems we are experiencing.
Hopefully I will get further on a tech support call which I hope to escalate to a level 2 or 3 tech tomorrow.
Got off the phone with tech support this morning....tech put me on hold and came back and said there would have to be a hardware vpn established between the sites to make this work. He then went on to explain the technology used RSYNC and there would be too many hops for this to work over the internet.
I did find that a competitor seems to have this working with RSYNC over at QNAP. So, I'll be sending all this equipment back to the reseller and moving on. Too bad as I had high hopes this would work as advertised.
*LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN*
Forgot to mention that I also used the "knowledge base" document at http://www.buffalotech.com/knowledgebase/users/kb.php?id=10127&category_id=0&sid2= to try and make this work.
If hardware VPN is a requirement then I would strongly suggest that they add this limitation to the knowledge base document and the user manual.
I still think that this is doable if other vendors seem to be making this happen using the same RSYNC technology. The very fact that they have intentionally programmed the interface to "prevent" a user from even trying this really annoys me....especially when this is being advertised as being able to do NAS to remote NAS backups.
do you know if there will be a firmware upgrade available soon that stops us needing VPNs to do remote backup, presumably by disabling this rubbish sending of local IP address to the other box. I bought 3 of these boxes purely because of the advertised remote backup ability. VPNs are not possible with our network hardware unless we replace all our routers and that certainly wasnt stated as a requirement anywhere in the product description.
In my view the product is not currently fit for purpose. What are our rights as per the UK warranty on this?
We can only hope they look to incorporate this into future firmware updates. As far as I can tell by these forumns there are only a handful of people pushing the envelope to do these sorts of things. Most have given up and returned the units altogether.
As I'm using this for business, I went the other way and actually implemented a Cisco 881 Router at my 2 remote sites and established a hardware VPN back to my Cisco ASA Firewall. And it does indeed work as per the knowledge base document which states you need a VPN connection to make these units backup to each other.
Also spent some time with a Windows Rsync client and was able to get a remote backup sent to the remote NAS through it's public IP. Ended up not being a viable solution for me as I need to pull the data from the remote NAS not PUSH.
Still can't believe this crappy limitation of resolving the public IP to its local LAN IP. Hopefully more people will voice their complaints and we will eventually get this....if I had access to the source code I could do this in under 5 minutes.
Good luck!
I never got any additional help from Buffalo on this. We eventually "broke in" to our devices, installed SSH and ran Rsync. We don't have truly static IPs, but they are static enough for us. Keep in mind that our solution is for personal use. I would not trust this for corporate use.
It is interesting that Buffalo support told another user that an rsync solution wouldn't work. Because it does.
just gave a poor review of the product and a description of the problem on Amazon. Made me feel a tiny bit better :)
I've fallen into this same pit. I purchased two LS-CH2.0TL units (firmware 1.10) for the purpose of an off-site backup as advertised on the Buffalo site. Now I see it doesn't work the way it's advertized. In fact, it's pretty clunky even if you're running both units on a single LAN. The documentation is terrible to non-existant and the flow just doesn't make much sense.
In my case I can build a VPN to the remote site so perhaps I can get it to work. So far I've spent two days on it and had zero success even getting it to do a local backup.
I see this problem is being posted over and over on the Buffalo forums but in spite of that, Buffalo hasn't posted clear instructions nor have they fixed the routing problem. Hello? Is anyone out there?