Synology DSM5.0 remote access via DDNS

There are times when it would be very convenient to have remote access to our Synology NAS for various reasons. This is easily and securely accomplished.

Start from the Control Panel -> External Access -> DDNS tab:

One of the beautiful things about Synology is all the freebies. You can register yourself a free domain name through them, or you can always use any of the other service providers in the drop-down list. I'll go for the freebie, and select Synology as the provider and hit the "Register Now" button:

Once registered, you can login and administrate at https://myds.synology.com/ in the future, but this isn't necessary at the moment. At this point, we should configure our router and add some port forwarding rules, however DSM is probably still dynamically setting its IP address. Static IP is required, so change it to "Use manual configuration" in Control Panel -> Network -> Network Interface -> Edit LAN:

Now we can go set up our router at Control Panel -> External Access -> Router Configuration. DSM will try to automatically determine your router settings, and I was lucky enough that mine was detected:

From here, click the Create button and select Built-in application to create some port forwarding rules. In a previous post we set up Baikal, a calendar package, and now want to access it remotely. According to Baikal documentation, it uses the Web Station protocols, so we should at least enable port 80. Port 443 is the secure SSL encrypted version, but for purposes of this post to just get things running, simple HTTP access is sufficient:

Click "Save" when done, and DSM will configure the router. Great! We've set up a DDNS service, and enabled port forwarding, now all that remains is to connect over the vast internet!

Edit: Another alternative is to use https://www.noip.com to host a DNS redirect. This way you can host a local IP address to a URL-accessible location. Be sure to configure a new DNS host (A), not a redirect.