Airport Extreme - Remote Access of the attached HDD

Hello all,

I will soon buy an Airport Extreme Base Station and i will connect an external HDD on the available USB port of the AEBS. As i have seen from various reviews etc that HDD will be visible to the whole network, so no problem with that, since am in the network i can see the HDD. The problem starts when i am outside of the network. here is an example: The AEBS is in my office and i am at home and i need to access some file from that HDD by accessing it remotely from a windows machine. so here are the questions:

1. Can i do this by following an "easy" procedure? if yes, i would appreciate it a lot if you can give me some guide lines or any links that explaining the process of doing this. (I have tried to find some guides online but there is not a vary clear explanation on how you can do this)

2. and finally, is there any chance to have difficulties accessing the HDD remotely due to restrictions applied by the network admins? blocked ports etc..

At this point i want to underline that i want to access the HDD directly (through remote connection) and not remotely access my MBP first and then click on the available HDDs.

Thank you in advance, if you need any more info or a better explanation of what am trying to do let me know so i can give some more details!

Thx
Vitalion

Your last point - directly accessing the disk, makes easy mutually exclusive - as I never recommend an easy access without security.

The easiest - easiest way to access your hard drive is to use team viewer to remotely access your home computer - with the AEBS mounted. Then you could use the file transfer to get any files you need. Free, easy, gets by every firewall I've seen.
TeamViewer - Free Remote Access and Remote Desktop Sharing over the Internet

Otherwise you could setup SSH tunneling. This is secure but not easy. You still use a comptuer as an SSH server but you get to the AEBS directly.

I loathe to post this as you are opening up yourself to WAN attacks - but there is a way to open the disk to the wan port. Should work with AEBS with a disk but I only have a TC so I can't verify that.
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