Hi all,
I’m trying to set up a VPN with my Synology to connect to my Mac. I also have an AirPort Extreme router, which I believe I need to direct to certain ports? Everything I’ve found online is either out-dated or very technical. Does anyone have a good walk-through of how to set something like this up?
Ken
I set my Synology up as my VPN server a while ago and use it regularly from both my MAC and iPhone when I am on a public network. But I can’t remember exactly what I did (I just remember that it wasn’t a big deal 
If I can recreate the steps I will publish them here.
Even screenshots of your set up would help!
The Synology site has several good step by step
tutorials on how to do this. If uncomfortable with
that approach, you could consider Quick Connect.
This is a free service that Synology provides and
here is a pretty good description.
While not a full blown VPN, it will allow you to
access your NAS remotely.
If you are running the VPN server on your Synology, then when you make the connection to your home network, which is represented to the outside world by the Airport, you need to tell the airport to forward the incoming connection to the Synology.
This is called “port forwarding” and there is a section in the Airport Utility for setting this up.
I believe you can also tell the Synology to communicate this information to the Airport, and if you have enabled NAT-PNP or similar protocols in the Airport, it will allow the Synology to do this.
That’s all more complicated than you wanted to know. what I would suggest is that you use the Airport Utility, find the port forwarding section, and forward the following ports: 500, 1701, 4500 to the Synology.
Now, when you do this, the dialog that pops up will allow you to set the external ports (which are the ports that the Airport accepts the incoming VPN connection on) and the internal ports (the ports on the Synology that the connection is forwarded to). In both fields type 500,1701,4500 - eg the three ports in a row, separated by commas, in the same order in each field.
You also need to know the IP address for the Synology so you can set that in the same dialog. You can do this in a number of ways. Either you will tell the Synology to used a fixed IP address which you enter on the Synology itself, OR you will create on the Airport what is called a DHCP reservation, in which you tell the Airport to always give the Synology a specific IP address. To do the latter ,you look up the MAC address on the Synology and enter it into the DHCP reservation screen along with the IP address to give.
I know this sounds very complex, but in practice it is fairly easy to do. If your networking skillset is not up to the task I can provide a more detailed explanation.
The good news is that once you do this once you won’t have to do it again unless you change you networking configuration or hardware.