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The problem we have is simple and I doubt we're alone in having it, our users want access to their Windows shares from off-campus. We need a solution that's secure and simple. ATM we are running the Davenport SMB to WebDAV bridge and it does work, but the code is a bit buggy and not under active development any more. The WebDAV aspect works great though. We also run WebDisk which is a HTTP (i.e. web page) to SMB bridge and that works too, but is nowhere near as handy as being able to mount the share removely over WebDAV.

Are there another better alternatives out there that you could recommned? We try to run all Linux servers where possible, so ideally any solution shoudl run on Linux.

Thanks,

Bart.

P.S. I should have been more clear up-front, a VPN is not a viable solution for us ATM, just not practical with a few thousand staff and students and no budget for a VPN solution.

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  • VPN doesn't have to mean costs-money, as the link in my answer illustrates. Just sayin'. (Obviously you need one or more humans who can devote the time to setting it up, but you'll need that for whatever you do.)
    – chaos
    Jun 3, 2009 at 14:18

8 Answers 8

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If you want to even be able to say the word 'secure' in connection with this implementation and not blush, I'd think you'd have to run the connections over a proper VPN.

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SSH Port forwarding.

Putty provides a nifty interface and distribution could be done with some ini files. The problem would be that

  • you have to forward a couple of ports (ok not that much of a problem)
  • Connections to the SMB share would look like coming from localhost (being the SMB server itself)

Of course that would also be just some kind of VPN.

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I would think having a VPN solution such as OpenVPN might the best, but maybe that is overkill for this one task.

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Check Best way to mount a Linux filesystem on Windows over the Internet?

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Another solution might be to set up an sftp server, and use automount to mount the share in their sftp home directory.

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WebDAV with SSL? So you're using HTTPS. It would improve security a bit, while changing very little for your userbase.

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  • That's what we are doing. We're using Davenport for that but it's not under active development and rather old and stale - that's why I'm looking for an alternative product that does the same thing.
    – Bart B
    Jun 4, 2009 at 15:14
  • Hrm. We moved ours to IIS because their webdav is still being maintained. Sadly while webdav is dying it doesn't seem anybody's got anything that provides a similar service that isn't VPN based. We're actually looking at a SSL VPN from F5 but that of course costs money.
    – Laura Thomas
    Jun 4, 2009 at 18:02
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Alfresco ????

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You should consider Alfresco: it's an opensource Document Asset Management that offer a web interface, smb sharing, imap sharing and webdav sharing out of the box.

Community edition ( free one) does not have clustering features, but deploying 2 vms, one for tomcat part and one for mysql will bee enough for your needs.

Enterprise edition costs quite a lot but also has jmx management and clustering.

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