File Transporter Port Mapping

TL;DR

To find an open port available to access my File Transporter from work:

  1. Use the Firebind Scan Applet to find an open UDP port.
  2. Following the steps in this support article to assign your File Transporter to the open port.

Background

I’ve owned a File Transporter for almost a year now, but I’ve never been able to access it from my office. It’s been a source of endless frustration, because I store my entire paperless filing system on it and I need access to those documents fairly regularly.

It was a source of endless frustration, until today.

It’s not that I don’t need to access the documents any more; I finally fixed my access problem from the office. First, I should make clear that I work at a large company, so I don’t have any control over our IT policies. Our IT team is well intentioned, but this is not a problem that they would have had any interest in solving.

Initial Attempts

I started with this support article, which details the steps needed to assign your File Transporter to a port other than the default of UDP 8083. The article suggests using a high port number that won’t be in use by any other services, unless you’re in a secure network. In that case, you may want to use a common port number since those are more likely to be open. Since UDP 8083 wasn’t working for me, I tried their next suggestion of UDP 443 (see this list for the common uses of each port).

That still wasn’t working for me.

I learned a bit about using nmap to test the port statuses, to figure out why things weren’t working. Interestingly, I found that, in my home network, both ports 8083 and 443 were ‘Closed’. At work 443 was ‘Closed’ and 8083 was ‘Filtered’. At the time, I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t providing the -u flag to tell nmap to scan the UDP port instead of the TCP port.

The Solution

At bit of searching turned up the Firebind Scan Applet. I let it run in the background for a couple of hours to find a UDP port that my office network left open. It returned a few options (fewer than 1% of the ports were open), so I picked one. Using the same procedure as before, I changed the Transporter settings to use the new port. Voilà; success.

In hindsight, that seems like a trivial solution, but I was stumped for a long time. I thought I should document the steps I took to resolve the issue.

File Transporter Support

As a side note, the support team at Connected Data (the makers of File Transporter) is great. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about their help desk system. I know Drobo purchased Connected Data, and it seems like they’ve tried merging their support systems. When I log in from the File Transporter support site, I don’t see all of their support responses. If I log in via the Drobo site, I can see the complete chain. The responses that I do see often begin:

Hello $contacts.name.first $contacts.name.last,

And when I try responding by email, my responses almost always get bounced back to me. Anyway, this problem is resolved, so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.