Question

mapping a directory to Windows over the Internet

Asked by: x4u

What is a good method to map a Linux directory to Windows 2000/XP with the following requirements?
1) As fast as possible over a DSL connection (ftp seems to be really slow with many files)
2) secure against misuse, reasonable secure against sniffing (I can live with unencrypted data)
3) must appear as "real" directory or drive on the windows side (i.e. mapped to a drive letter)
4) may only use outgoing connections from windows to linux (firewall on the windows network)
5) local windows file and printer sharing must still be possible (cannot assign port 139 to ssh)

I tried to use webdav with apache2 but it turned out that webfolders seem to be a windows explorer feature only and were not accessible from the windows command line.

What I have read about about using samba over ssh is that it requires to me to disable windows file sharing to be able to reassign the port 139 to the ssh tunnel.

My next attempt would be NFS and MS services for Unix but I'm not whether this is a good idea.

Thank you for your help.

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Asked On
2004-06-20 at 17:54:20ID21032101
Tags

over

,

windows

,

samba

Topic

Linux Networking

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: ahoffmannPosted on 2004-06-21 at 03:03:17ID: 11358125

use Samba on Linux
Samba can be run in SSL-mode, but it depends on your clients if it is possible

 

by: Anton74Posted on 2004-06-26 at 19:38:21ID: 11408335

Running Samba over a (proper) VPN would seem to fit the bill and meet all your requirements (except maybe speed, see below).

I can highly recommend OpenVPN; it is solidly constructed, multi-platform and firewall friendly, and is more than adequate in the security department if so configured. And it is Free. OpenVPN, along with excellent documentation, can be found here: http://openvpn.sourceforge.net

However, I'm not sure that running file sharing over DSL (which typically has a relatively slow upload speed) is comfortable performance wise. I briefly tried that once, with a 256kbit/s uplink on both sides, but quickly abandoned that and went with Remote Desktop through OpenVPN instead (Windows to Windows of course, with a Linux system on the office side being a VPN end point and router), which is perfect for what I do and much, much faster than running the application locally with the data on the remote share. Your situation may be different of course.

Anton

 

by: x4uPosted on 2004-07-04 at 11:47:04ID: 11468915

Thank you ahoffmann and Anton74 for your suggestions and sorry for the delay. I wasn't able to test this for some days.
Configuring ssl for samba turned out to be more difficult for me than it looked at first so I asked a friend to help me who came up with webdrive for WebDAV which turned out to be the perfect solution for me. It's not really secure but acceptable for my needs as it works at least with Digest Authentification to prevent misuse of my server. It's a click and run installation on the client and it can cache all files which makes it a really fast virtual drive. I think I'll try OpenVPN once I feel more at home with Linux and may want more than a simle mapped drive.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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