Samba sharing on Asus RT-AC56U

[Auream]

I thought I might be able to cheap out on buying a NAS by simply attaching an old 1TB hard drive I had laying around to the USB3 port of my new Asus RT-AC56U. I went in and enabled SMB sharing and it seemed to work great! For the simple tasks I wanted that would be all I needed.

Later when I was testing OpenVPN access to confirm I could access the share outside my network. I was kinda surprised when I was able to access this SMB share from outside the network even with VPN turned off! Is this normal? I can obviously see the point of making FTP access available from the WAN side, but SMB? In any event, I couldn't seem to find a way to restrict access to the disk only within the local LAN. Is that option there but not readily visible?

I'd much prefer to access the SMB share over VPN rather than just raw unencrypted over the open internet.

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but I couldn't find it doing a few different google searches.

 

[ikoul]

It's an issue that only came up recently, so it's going to take a fix in an upcoming firmware or rolling back to an older one (not sure which).

Here's the topic where people have been talking about this: http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=14660

 

[Auream]

Wow that's exactly what I was looking for. Not sure how I missed that thread. Thanks!

 

[RMerlin]

Asus has been recently notified of the issue. For now I recommend either disabling SMB sharing on the AC56/AC68, or at least ensuring that your shares are password-protected.

Unfortunately, for some odd reason there are currently no way to manually secure this through iptables.