Clueless re. USB Application on new RT-AC68 router

[RedSatinDress]

I managed to get the router up & running perfectly, but when I had purchased it I had high hopes of being able to simply plug in a USB 3 thumb drive to be able to access files from any computer on my LAN. My initial forays into the USB Application were horrendous (for a while I managed to lock myself out of being able to logon to the router itself! Yikes!) and I know when I'm in way over my head.

The more I look into this, the more it seems like any data I managed to load onto the USB drive can ONLY be accessed via the internet. Is this true And if really don't want FTP services or anything fancy will I be able to use the USB drive connected to the router itself? Clearly Asus's intentions go far beyond my simple needs.

At home, I have a very nice Synology NAS system set up, but we travel for months at a time in a motorhome and often have no internet access in these remote places but we'd still really like to be able to share files (NOT using Windows - sometimes both our computers aren't "on").

If what I want to do is possible, could you please point me to what I have to read up on to accomplish it? The USB Application seems to direct me to DDNS, and AiCloud and I'm really getting lost.

Thanks.

 

[thiggins]

Local file access is possible. Have you tried setting up a mapped drive, pointed at 192.168.1.1?

Make sure the SAMBA service is running and that your drive is recognized.