Forum Discussion
Wonder_Woman
May 07, 2023Copper Contributor
W11 & W10 Pro - how to map a network drive while on VPN
Hello,
Configuring a SOHO home network for myself. I have a NAS that I need to be able to access remotely through a VPN. I am able to use Wireguard VPN, it connects to the router, I am able to ping the NAS and I have both port forwarding configured and I have network discovery turned on. The last parts of the config for me are somethings I have never done before and cannot find through Googling.
I have never mapped any network drives while on VPN, I have only done it while on a LAN and I am able to successfully do that to my NAS but again, only on my LAN. I tried to do the same process but cannot get the NAS to show up. Here's what I do:
Open Windows Explorer (My PC)>Top of the window area locate "map network drive" and then I hit my dead end. Just browsing for the NAS doesn't work - doesn't show up, and entering the info manuallly as in the typical "\\server\share" doesn't work either - it also doesn't show up there.
I feel like I am doing something wrong.
The last part of the project will be to enable the firewall on the router and add a port forwarding rule.
Thank you for the help.
Sincerely,
Wonder_Woman
- someone_from_the_forumCopper Contributor
I recently mapped a VPN-reachable network location to a drive letter on my Windows 11 machine. A couple potentially unintuitive steps I had to go through were: 1) getting the local IP address of the target machine (e.g. "192.168.1.100") by using "ipconfig /all" on another machine that already had access to it on the same LAN, and 2) modifying the hosts file on my own machine so that my usual domain name for the target (e.g. "//MyFileServer") is translated to its local IP address. My use case was to give myself access to my company's file server from my home PC when connected by VPN.