How do you use FreeNAS in conjunction with OpenWRT?

[average_user]

I have been using OpenWRT on my router for a couple of years. I
connect to it remotely with SSH and VPN. I plugged an USB disk to it and
ran minidlna, NFS/Samba server, transmission-cli, git etc. all on the
router. However, my USB disk has gone down a couple of weeks ago and
now I am looking for a replacement. I heard that NAS dedicated boxes
are more reliable and definitely faster. If I chose a NAS over USB
disk I would definitely install FreeNAS on it. But how would OpenWRT
and FreeNAS work together in such scenario? NAS would be yet another
device that I could ssh into but I wouldn't like to expose it to an
outside world and would like my router be become the only device
available from outside for security. Would mounting FreeNAS share on
OpenWRT with NFS be a reasonable solution to access NAS storage
remotely? Inside LAN of course, I would run minidlna, NFS/Samba
server, transmission-cli on my NAS box and not on router anymore. I
hope it would have a good impact on my router health.

At the end of the day, I was happy with USB disk and wouldn't consider
changing it if it didn't go down and as such a dedicated NAS box
sounds as an overkill to me because it would duplicate everything my
router did. Is my thinking correct?

 

[SweetAndLow]

either ssh into your freenas box from your router or configured a vpn to access your freenas box. Mounting an nfs share on your router would also work but seems kind of strange. Unless your goals is to use your router as a remote host and not just a place to hop into your network from.

 

[average_user]

Mounting FreeNAS share on router serves a specific goal: easily accessing FreeNAS share on other devices when I am not in LAN. I wouldn't have to do this as this can be easily done using port forwarding on a standard *nix box but things become harder on Android. You're right that VPN is another solution - it would be enough to VPN into my router.