I have a Mandrake Linux (10) Samba server (3.0?) at the office, behind a router, and a CentOS server at home, also behind a router. I *think* would like to replicate the Samba server to my home server in real time.

The actual problems I need to solve are:
1) I would like to have a real-time (if possible) replication of my corporate files (on the Samba server);
2) I would like to allow my wife to access corporate files when she is at home;
and
3) I would like my wife to see the same mail at both the office and home (we have pop3 accounts on Outlook 2K).

I am also thinking of switching the Mandrake server to CentOS, so that I have the same distro on both servers. I will set up Samba on the CentOS server this weekend.

I *thought* I needed a VPN, but perhaps I don't. Can someone please point me in a/the right direction?

Thanks!

--Alden

Oh, yeah. One more thing: all of the clients are WinXP.

If necessary (I *think* it will help), I have 2 ethernet cards in the CentOS box, and I can add a second to the Mandrake box.

for pptp vpn use poptop.
and for mails i suggest you to use imap instead of pop because in pop , fetched mails are deleted from mail server(default behaviour)

Do I need to create a VPN? If so, I will do it. I *think* that the most important item to me is replication in near real-time.

My thought is that I only need to set up a connection between the two servers, replicate them, and have Outlook point to it's local server for mail storage. This way, I will have two local networks that look identical to the user.

I don't really want to use IMAP, because my wife has GBs of mail, and I can't determine which of it she will need to refer to at any given time. I don't really want to ask her to archive, because it's an extra step to search for old emails.

I'm also okay if Outlook files can't replicate across the Internet while the pst file is open, as long as it can once the file is closed.