Secure connection to office computer
 

Three years ago, I established a VPN setup that allows a handful of remote users to tunnel into our office network. Primarily, the remote users utilize the VPN to work from home and access files on their desktop Macs (myself included, of course!). The remote users all have routers at home that support IPSec pass-through.

The only VPN setup that I could get to actually work is an IPSec connection that is "network to network", allowing only very specific ranges of remote IP addresses to tunnel in to and through our Netgear FVS318 router. And it works beautifully, no complaints there.

However, when I'm on the road with my Powerbook, I'm at the mercy of every remote router (some do not permit IPSec pass-through), and I just cannot establish the VPN/IPSec connection to my office computer no matter what I try. With more and more wi-fi connectivity out there, I really would like to be able to get to my office computer from a wide variety of locations, not just from home.

Other than an IPSec VPN, is there another way to get to the files on my desktop? I've had several "friends" tell me I should establish a secure sockets connection to my desktop, but I'm not sure what that entails. I don't want to fork out the bucks for something like Timbuktu.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

GS

Bump Bump Bump

I know very little about secure connections... but did have dealings with a similar problems a few years ago with needing static IP's to be able to get into our server remotely... we ended up using a service called 'no-ip'

http://www.no-ip.com/

it worked a treat, we could check our emails by logging into the server from anywhere.... and it allowed our remote office to access our ordering software.

You could turn on remote access and use Cyberduck or some other SFTP capable software to ssh into your home system. You may need to set up a DMZ or virtual server on your router.

Be sure that you've got a strong password and don't give out your username!

You can use something like MacFusion: http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users.../MacFusionWeb/
With this you can ssh to your machine and mount the drive as if it were a local network drive. It uses the MacFUSE from google as it's core (File system in User Space).

MacFUSE, MacFusion, Dreamhost and rsync Backups
 

http://matt.makalumedia.com/2007/05/...-rsync-backups
appears to be a very interesting, very capable approach. Probably more than what the original poster requires but it demonstrates what can be achieved.

hmm are you just looking for remote file sharing over the internet? In that case SFTP like mentioned earlier would be a good idea. You set it up server side, it requires authentication, is encrypted and anyone access it from the interwebs.

Most routers support port forwarding, you could always use 23 or 443 for ssh connections and then tunnel like a VNC client (which is open source) through that tunnel and you could copy/paste files needed.

however, having it centralized on a server sounds more ideal to me for pure data management reasons.

Do you have any servers running in your company you could set this up on? If you didn't in all honesty a cheap linux box could probably do the trick, and keep your costs down.