Accessing a NAS securely

[jhonrox]

Hi guys,

I recently got a NAS enclosure and added a 1TB hdd to it, to make my files accessible for 2 other computers in my home network. The NAS has inbuilt SMB, FTP, BT, and Media Server, and also an administration page to manage all the settings. Everything is working fine in the local network and I can use the admin page by using 192.168.x.y.

However, I also wanted to do this remotely and so gave the NAS a static ip and did all the necessary port-forwarding on the router. I can now access it (the admin page) via the internet when I enter my public-iport, after entering the username and password, of course. But I always get asked if I want to continue as the details will be send as 'plain text'.

So, could someone help me make this connection secure? I read a bit about VPN

In a nutshell -- a VPN is a method of connecting private networks together over a public network.. For example the internet. You have a network at your home, you have a network at work.. You use a VPN to create a secure connection between these networks over a unsecured network (internet). This "tunnel" if you can use any of different methods to secure the private traffic from the unsecured public network.. This could be SSL, this could be ipsec, L2TPv3, etc.
vpn to NAS - Neowin Forums

and I know my router supports it (Linksys WRT54GS), but I don't know anything else?

Any help will be very much appreciated. The NAS won't be left switched on 24/7 and nor will it have any sensitive data stored in it, but I would still like it to be secure. We are still talking about the admin page by the way. Would it be possible to make remote FTP access secure as well? Or does the NAS have to have inbuilt SFTP?

Thanks!