Background
Remote access to your GoFlex Home does not depend on Seagateshare. As long as you know your WAN IP address you could always connect remotely and that hasn't changed. Seagateshare just saved you from having to know, or remember your IP address, for example 134.204.236.40 and instead you just have to remember your GoFlex Home name. That's very convenient especially if your IP address changes frequently.
If you liked Seagateshare remote access to your GoFlex Home web server, now that Seagate has shut it down you can still get remote access with a name by setting up a third party proxy service.
Sign up for a third-party proxy service like DuckDNS.org
Makeuseof.com has some recommendations on free dynamic DNS providers and I really like duckdns.org . It's literally a few seconds work to set up a sub domain to redirect to your GoFlex Home and more importantly you don't need to install a client to update your IP address as they provide instructions on how to do that as a cron task.Their instructions for "installing" duckdns need a little tweaking though, so I have added a post on how to do that
I haven't looked into the alternatives to duckdns too closely, but if they can't be updated with cron then unless you have a fixed public IP address you will need to install a Linux client like inadyn, ddclient, ez-ipupdate or updatedd on your GoFlex Home and before you can do that you need to install a package manager like ipkg (update: if you want to go with a different dynamic DNS service and use an update client I have added a post on how to install ipkg). But it's a bit of messing around and that's why I like duckdns.
And whichever third party proxy service you use you will also need to
- make sure that port 80 for http or port 443 for https is not blocked by your ISP
- set your router to forward requests on port 80 or port 443 to your GoFlex Home's LAN IP address. You will also need to set your router to reserve an IP address for the GoFlex Home so it doesn't change (or you can set GoFlex Home preferences to use a static LAN IP address).
- Disable remote access in Preferences> Server Preferences> Remote Access.
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| Disable remote access |
Security
The biggest security risk with remote access is username and password. If you have a user user1 with a password = password1 or something similar then you're just asking for trouble.
Add to that the ongoing security issues with Adobe Flash which the web pages use and won't work without and I don't know that remote access to the web pages is worth the risk, but you can improve security considerably by restricting access with firewall rules - see my post GoFlex Home iptables firewall security
Update: Vulnerabilities have been discovered in the hipserv API which allow hackers to remotely execute commands on your GoFlex Home.Several users have reported suspicious activity with the web pages becoming unresponsive and abnormal traffic affecting their router. This is probably the real reason Seagate shut down remote access. The problem with that is that even with seagateshare shut down, as long as ports 80 or 443 are forwarded you are at risk - thanks for sharing, Seagate... oh wait, you didn't.
I do not recommend opening ports 80 or 443 unless you apply firewall (iptables) rules to prevent access from unauthorised IP addresses. See my post GoFlex Home Iptables firewall security. Even better, don't allow remote access to the web pages over the internet at all and just use SSH and SFTP with only port 22 forwarded.
HTTP or HTTPS? The GoFlex Home has SSL so it can handle HTTPS, but the security certificate is self-signed and in any case will expire in October 2018, so you get security warnings from your browser if you try connecting with https, but you can safely ignore those since it's your own server.
Simple usernames and weak passwords are a much bigger risk than someone intercepting unencrypted HTTP data exchange, but I don't know what you are keeping on your GoFlex Home so it may be better to go with HTTPS, block port 80 and forward port 443 and put up with the browser warnings.
That's your choice, but don't overlook the weak password problem either way.
Just to be clear; I don't recommend remote access to the web server and I don't know why anyone would want it, but that's your business.
Playing around with the web pages I found that I could watch movies off my GoFlex Home in a web browser (but only if they are mp4). That's an interesting novelty and not something I'm ever going to use. I don't think the risks are worth it plus I don't have enough patience for the slowness of the web interface.
Registering your GoFlex Home
A much more serious problem is what happens if you have to reflash the firmware or do a factory reset. The first admin user needs to be set up during the registration process with the "Central Server" i.e. Seagateshare.com.
As usual, Seagate isn't much help and their only advice is "Do not use the Factory Reset Button on the side of the device’s base to reset the device."
I had a look at this over the Christmas break as promised and have created separate blog posts for reflashing without seagateshare as well as a guide for creating your own firmware system backup
Thanks go to Nhựt Anh Lê for the advance warning of the seagateshare shutdown or I along with everyone else would have been stuck without a solution to the Factory Reset issue.
