NAS non WIFI? Wake NAS from Launchbox?

[ChunkyLoverMark]

Hi, so with what I've found with the new NAS feature on Android, it only seems to find my NAS when I'm on the same WIFI network with my Android device as my NAS. Is this true for all setups or just mine? If this is the case, could this potentially be upgraded in the future?

 

Also, the Android Launchbox app won't wake up my NAS when it's gone to sleep and I have to use a third party file manager to wake it up first. Again is this expected or just my set-up and if it is true could this potentially be upgraded in the future?

 

Thank you for your time.

Edited February 10 by ChunkyLoverMark

[AstroBob]

Hi There,

3 hours ago, ChunkyLoverMark said:

Hi, so with what I've found with the new NAS feature on Android, it only seems to find my NAS when I'm on the same WIFI network with my Android device as my NAS. Is this true for all setups or just mine? If this is the case, could this potentially be upgraded in the future?

Yes, this is common behavior for most NAS setups. NAS devices are typically designed to be discoverable via local network protocols (such as SMB or NFS) and do not natively support discovery over the internet unless additional configurations (like port forwarding, VPN, or cloud services) are used. Right now, this is very much up to how the individual NAS is configured, so it should be possible to setup, but we don't have any visibility over that on the LaunchBox side.

 

3 hours ago, ChunkyLoverMark said:

Also, the Android Launchbox app won't wake up my NAS when it's gone to sleep and I have to use a third party file manager to wake it up first. Again is this expected or just my set-up and if it is true could this potentially be upgraded in the future?

This is again dependent on the supporting Wake-on-LAN (WoL) packet to the NAS when trying to access it. Some third-party file managers support this, which is why they work.

• If your NAS supports Wake-on-LAN, you could try manually waking it up using another app before launching Launchbox.
• Right now I don't believe we support Wake-on-LAN within the Launchbox app so that it sends a magic packet to wake the NAS when needed. It's something we could look to add in the future though.

Hope that helps to clarify. Give me a shout if you have any more questions.

 

[ChunkyLoverMark]

That's good to know, thank you AstroBob 👍

Edited February 10 by ChunkyLoverMark

[ChunkyLoverMark]

So based on what @AstroBob said above, does anyone have any recommendations for NAS drives that I can use with Android Launchbox that I can download games when I'm on a different network to my NAS drive?

 

I currently use the Nvidia Shield 2017 and I want to upgrade to a newer NAS. Any recommendations appreciated. 

[faeran]

On 3/1/2025 at 10:29 AM, ChunkyLoverMark said:

So based on what @AstroBob said above, does anyone have any recommendations for NAS drives that I can use with Android Launchbox that I can download games when I'm on a different network to my NAS drive?

 

I currently use the Nvidia Shield 2017 and I want to upgrade to a newer NAS. Any recommendations appreciated. 

It's not really something that's solved with hardware, but with networking configuration.

The easiest way for you to do this would probably be via VPN. Set up something like Open VPN on your home network and then connect to it via your Android device while out and about, and your Android phone would act like it's on your home network and be able to access any locally shared drives.

You could also make your drive public to the internet, but the risk would be higher and configuration would be much more complex if you are not used to fiddling with that stuff.