Port Forwarding for QuickConnect Using Synology Photos and Synology Drive

Synology
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1

Thanks Rex for detailed explanation of Synology NAS. I also watched the video on Port Forwarding, which may have security issues.

I live in Asia. My main usage are synology photos (i.e. Photos Mobile app) and Synology Drive. Those applications are just fantastic and I really enjoy these apps which help me to reorganize tons of my photos and files.

The problem of using these two applications is really the speed of external access. QuickConnect is fantastic as it can sense whether I am in local network or external. However, when I try to access Photos Mobile outside my local network. The speed drops drastically and become painfally slow. After watching multiple videos from Will, the slow speed of accessing Photos and Drive are because QuickConnect is trying to access my NAS through Relay Servers. Those Relay Servers for me are at Singapore and I wish to get rid of the Relay Servers becauses they are REALLY SLOW.

So I try to setup Port Forwarding. But after watching Will’s videos, I know that I need to open up Port 5001 & 6690 for direct acccess to the NAS. Right now I use default Port Forwarding and the external access for Photos and Drive App are much improved!! But Will suggests that I should set the external port to be an arbitary port number (e.g. 55551 & 66669) to avoid the default 5001 & 6690 ports. But if I set like this, will QuickConnect from Photos Mobile and Synology Drive failed to connect my NAS directly???

I know I can access the Photos or Drive by directly input the artibary port 10.5.125.63:55551 or 66669. But this means the QuickConnect will be disabled and I can no longer access the apps via local network if I am at home. Can this be solved?

I saw Will’s video and mutliple posts suggesting to use OpenVPN so that there is an external layer of security. But using OpenVPN requies an extra step. It’s fine for me but my parents and kids are not used to use vpn every time when they use photos or drive.

Currently I have 2FA setup to make sure my login is safe.

It would be nice if someone can provide some advice. Thanks.

2

QuickConnect does not use the port numbers. It does not care. Hence, it does not matter.

Before using port numbers with applications, I strongly encourage you to go into Control Panel > Login Portal from the DSM desktop. Here, you can configure a custom port for DSM on the first tab, which you probably already did, and ports for your applications from the Application tab.
As far as I know, port 6690 is used by Synology Drive ShareSync to sync between 2 NAS devices. As mentioned, you configure a port in the Login Portal for the Synology Drive client.