I'm looking for suggestions on some good file sharing solutions, other then FTP. I have an OpenSuSE 10 Linux server at home. While at home I access my files stored on the server with Samba. I'm looking for a good way to access my files while I'm at work (Windows XP) or on the road with my laptop (Mac OS X). I have Dynamic DNS setup and my firewall configured for remote SSH access, so I currently use SCP when needed, but it's kind of a pain sometimes.

I'm looking for a solution where I can tunnel a port from whereever I am, through my SSH connection, to my server at home. Then launch some client application that connects though my SSH tunnel and allows me to drag-and-drop files to and from my server at home.

I'm currently using SCP and FTP to get by, but I hope there's a better solution out there. Maybe Samba would work, but I've had a hard time tunneling it though SSH because it requires UDP ports (which SSH can't tunnel).

Thanks for any help.

Some ideas:
rsync
SFTP

or if you want to go whole hog, set up a VPN

if you look, you can find decent SFTP clients that use a GUI, SFTP is a FTP style protocol that uses SSH.

hi there,

i'm kinda tagging into this post another question, i've setup vsftpd with openssl, is that the same as SFTP using ssh? or is that another way again of securing ftp? i'm not happy with FTP + SSL because i can not access it using a web browser, i need a client, if ssh + ftp is a different way of doing it can i access that via a bew browser?

no

We're not talking about FTP over SSH, we're talking about SFTP, and no, I don't know of any way to use it in the browser.

SFTP is just a special SSH client that manipulates files in a way that appears to the user like FTP. I've used a command line SCP client (an SSH version of cp) installed on a USB drive, although it was a little tricky to get it to work (set paths and environmental variables) but AFAIK there aren't any truly portable clients for SFTP or SSH. OpenSSH has a windows port of their command line utilities and I belive PuTTY has a graphical SFTP client, but these need to be installed into Windows.

As for using something that would work in a web browser, probably only if it's based on HTTP or FTP protocol. Web browsers have this thing about manipulating files on the local system, something about fear of virii, that makes them not very well suited to the task.

If you can install something on the windows client I'd look for a graphical SFTP client and then all you need is an SSH server on the system you need access to, which it sounds like you already have.