I am running a CentOS 5.x server and have a number of samba shares. I want one or two people to be able to remotely access these shares from off campus, and I want it to be secure - there are financial records, etc.

The solution that has popped up in various answers (from searching this forum and Google) is to use OpenVPN and set up an old box as a permanent tunnel in the office, then have him VPN in. I don't have much experience with this (tunneling via VPN and I am looking for a bit more detail on how this setup would work or how I could get started? I know that I'll need an old box with OpenVPN on it, but beyond that I'm pretty clueless. Does the employee then connect to the box via VPN and then the mapped drives (they're using Win7) will mount? If it's that simple, I can easily set this up - I just want to make sure that there's not more I'm missing.

P.S. - Hope this didn't belong in Server or Newbie - if so, please feel free to report and/or move this thread. Thanks

It sounds like you have a pretty solid grasp on how VPN works.

You might want to look into PPTPD. Most Operating Systems have pptp built in. OpenVPN will require extra software on the clients. This article has some pretty good instructions.

http://docs.cslabs.clarkson.edu/wiki...TP_on_CentOS_5

Is there any advantage to using PPTPD on the CentOS box over OpenVPN?

As far as I know, both services should happily run on CentOS. The real advantage to PPTPD is client support. Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android all have ability to connect to PPTPD.