I have a redhat box at work and use it as a file server for lots of win clients. Now i need to access these same shares from home..


i hear samba over the net is "not recomended" due to security reasons but my question is this, if everybody connecting from home has a static ip and i allow only thoes ip's to access the share isn't that fine?

Since the answer to that is prob no for one reason or another what are some good vpn servers (that are based on ipsec) that are free, for linux. OpenVPN doesn't support ipsec

Also any url's to tutorials would be greatly appreachated..


-realized

well the obvious answer regarding the samba over net is no because ips can be spoofed...no encryption. freeswan is an ipsec free linux vpn i hear it''s pretty good never used it myself. but that's just the one I have off the top of my head...good luckl

Alex

http://www.freeswan.org/ , looks like that will work !

thanks bro. will prob set it up this next weekend and let you know how it goes

If anybody else has info please post also since i am not doing this for a week Tuturals, other vpn soultions, etc..


-realized

If you run a winbox at home yu could also use pptp which is a microsoft vpn, which, at first was definantly inferior to ipsec, but has become more secure. You would need to install PoPToP on the red hat box at work and using a dial-up VPN which is availale in windows 95 and up. I set that up on my personal server, and had very good success with it I used it to log on to my home lan. I chose it because my research indicated that IPsec was more for permanant lan connections from lan to lan whereas pptp was more like an RAS dial-up server, like ISP's use for dialup connections. I aslo chose it under the assumption that almost any computer I used away from home would use Windows, and since a pptp client was part of windows from 95 up I could logon from any almost any computer, also linux has a pptp client that can be used as well. YOu can also use a ssh connection and tunnel your network traffic through that to to and from the red hat server. THis works especially well if using it for web based administration tools used with the server on the other end. But of course you can also use the command line log-in from the ssh wondow to administer what needs to be done. Then there is VNC similar to Remote desktop on Windows, this would be ideal if you have Xwindows on the server and want to administer it through a GUI interface, you would need to setup the VNC server on RedHat and then get a VNC client for windows(if your home box is windows otherwise a VNC client for linux would work as well) I imagine however, the VNC is out, as most servers do not run with Xwindows, in order to increase resources for it's main job of serving. These are just some other ideas, if you want more info let me know, I can help you with most of this stuff. I did some serious research into VPN's and I have three or four VPN reference books, plus my own experience. Good luck to you let me know.

Alex

PS. you could use putty a windows client for telnet, ssh, scp, etc... to access the server with ssh and then use scp to copy files to/from the directorys you need, that would be bare bones but the easiest to implement. Of course if you need to support domain logon or other things. I would reccomend PPTP.....It''s the easiest on the windows side.

I use Samba over OpenVPN from Chicago to California, and also from California to Asia. Works perfectly every time.