ANSWERED Accessing CIFS share behind VPN

[kinsham 1]

I would like to mount a CIFS share on a VPN connected computer on a second remote computer mount point. Both of these run in Debian 10. The first is a local server that hosts the storage volume and the second is an AWS EC2 instance.
My attempt at this doesn't work.
sudo mount -t cifs //myserver.mydomain/myshare /mnt/myshare/ -o user=myself,domain=myworkgroup,pass=**********
I get the error
Mount error (115): Operation now in progress.
I'm wondering if there are some ports I need to open in the tunnel?

[OpenSourcerer 1363]

3 hours ago, kinsham said:

I'm wondering if there are some ports I need to open in the tunnel?

Samba listens on the default SMB ports 139 and 445, all of which are not forwardable with AirVPN because they're <1024. Your error could be a simple unreachability, or the message for a timeout. You must rebind them in the Samba configuration.

smb ports (G)

    Specifies which ports the server should listen on for SMB traffic.

    Default: smb ports = 445 139

I'd like to very strongly advise you not to open any SMB ports to the internet, even if they're more or less obscure like 51906. And very, very, very strongly advise you to not open NetBIOS (port 139), no matter how funny or innovative your idea of how to keep that one secure might be.
Protocols such as NFS and SMB were absolutely not made for being shared over the internet. Please look for alternatives. Some ideas: WebDAV, rsync, SFTP.

[kinsham 1]

That's good advice, thank you. I want to mount my ~2TB local storage on an EC2 instance to avoid the high recurring cost of AWS storage. I don't think the alternatives suggested enable that? I'm not aware of any method to accomplish this securely.

[OpenSourcerer 1363]

24 minutes ago, kinsham said:

I don't think the alternatives suggested enable that?

They all enable that. Except for rsync, maybe, that's really more for synchronization, you are right. Because you are on Linux, SMB wouldn't be the best choice, anyway.
I'd connect them using sshfs. It's a way to mount filesystems over SSH, with FTP as transport.

[kinsham 1]

Thanks for that suggestion. sshfs works perfectly for what I was trying to do. 👍