Remote Seagate Access free alternative for Seagate PersonalCloud

As Seagate annouced to terminate the Seagate Access sevrice,

Note: Effective May 15th, 2021, the Seagate Access and MyNAS services for NAS OS 4 devices will no longer be available, including their remote access functionality, Sdrive, and mobile app integrations. This change will not affect the data on your NAS device.

For additional information about other available options for remotely accessing your NAS OS 4 device, please see our support article here.

Both remote access URLs ‘personalcloud.seagate.com’ and ‘webaccess.ra.seagate.com’ are dead , And we are not able to connect to our NAS from extranal anymore :(

The solution provided by Seagate is to get a static IP address, or use a dynamic DNS service suppored by router. However, the DDNS service supported by my router cost money, as well as the static IP address. There are several free DDNS services but none of them are supported by my router. So here I am going to use the free DDNS service https://www.dynu.com/ and setup a cron job on my Seagate Personal Cloud NAS to update the IP automatically.

1. First apply a new dynamic DNS domain on https://www.dynu.com/
   Just follow the instructions on webpage and you will see your domain in the control panel
2. Generate your API key on dynu.com
   Write down the API key for later use.
3. curl to get your domain id
   curl "https://api.dynu.com/v2/dns" -H "API-key: [apikey]"
You will see JSON reponse like

{"domains":[{"id":12345678,"name":"mydomain.freeddns.org","unicodeName":"mydomain.freeddns.org","token":"XXXXXX","state":"Complete","group":"","ipv4Address":"xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx","ipv6Address":null,"ttl":60,"ipv4":true,"ipv6":false,"ipv4WildcardAlias":false,"ipv6WildcardAlias":false,"createdOn":"2021–06–28T05:19:37","updatedOn":"2021–06–29T02:47:47"}]}

Write down the domain name and id for later use.

4. Enable SSH on your NAS

5. Login through command terminal
ssh [your_admin_user]@[your NAS IP address]
e.g. ssh austinchang@192.168.0.10

6. Add cron job in /etc/cron.d
cd /etc/cron.d/
sudo vi my_ddns
You may be prompted for password and warned about root access.

7. Press ito edit mode, then paste the below line in the editor (Remember to replace ‘[domain_id]’, ‘[domain_name]’ and ‘[apikey]’ to yours)

0 * * * * root /usr/bin/curl -s -X POST "https://api.dynu.com/v2/dns/[domain_id]" -H "accept: application/json" -H "API-Key: [apikey]" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"name\":\"[domain_name]\",\"ipv4Address\":\"`curl -s ifconfig.me`\"}"

8. Press Esc to exit edit mode. And then press :wqand Enter to save the file

9. Done. The NAS will start to update the DDNS every one hour.