setting up web access to MBL ... questions

[zero7404]

being this is my first NAS, i have some questions about setting up the drive for remote access. i want to be able to access and stream movies on the NAS over the web, should i set up a wd2go account to do this ? how exactly does this service work, is it secure ? would FTP be more/less secure ? for the router, what settings or changes would i need to make in order to allow an outside connection to the drive ? once again i am concerned about my network's security, so if i can obtain a MAC address of the device i will be connecting from, i would add it to the list of MACs i am allowing to connect to the router. i am not sure how wd2go actually works, all i know are the basics, create an account and send to an email address. is it a client that establishes a direct connection or does it use WD's servers to relay data ?

[Myron]

I don't beleive WD2go allows you to stream media.

Also, an unrelated issue.I have tried to use WD2go but was met by a certificate security error as pictured below . . .

I think I won't be using WD2go. At least not just yet. (It's also takes a long time for things to just `happen`.)

[zero7404]

i think i want to go with FTP to access and pull files from the drive remotely. but i'm first trying to grasp how FTP works. there is also secure FTP (SFTP) which i'm looking into. i think i need to use filezilla client on the machine i wish to use to access the drive, but some questions i have are: if i configure port forwarding on my router to allow FTP access to the drive, which ports should i open so that the drive can be accessed ? i don't leave my computers on all the time, but the NAS is always on as well as the router, so if i set up FTP access would that allow me to access the NAS directly ? my router uses DHCP but i have made IP address reservations for each device on my network. my devices are set to DHCP, but the router always assigns the same IP address to each device. i use verizon fios internet, so i'm not sure if my ISP IP address is DHCP or static, i never really plugged into the modem to configure it. so i am not sure how to go about figuring out the address or hostname i need to have set up in order to find my network from the internet ...