Hello everyone!

I currently have ProFTPd setup on a Madrake 9.1 server which is great and all but is there a way to remotely open files on the server instead on completely downloading them over the ftp and then opening them on the remote machine? Some of the files are quite large and take time to download.

Thanks in advance! Just looking for ideas.

do you mean extract files on the server?

Well, let's say I have a very large pdf file. Inside my network via Samba, I can mearly open the file and view it, rather than copying it to a computer and then opening it. With proftpd, I have to copy the file to the remote machine outside my network first, then open/view it. Kinda like, the file is download-on-demand. The farther into the file you want to see, the more it's downloaded to the remote machine instead of downloading the entire thing first. Like if the pdf is 560 pages and you only want to see page 4, you only have to download 4 pages to see it.

I would prefer if the files opened remotely were read only, of course. And a secure loging would be nice too.

Is there any way to do this?

Thanx for te reply, sega01!!! Much appreaciated!

Maybe ssh with X forwarding would be a good option for you.

Hmm, I see. Is this comatpible with Windows? Most all of the remote macines that connect to this server are Windows boxes (unfortunate, I know).

Thank you redazz!

You'd probably do best to run a Samba server so that Win clients can simply use Network Neighborhood, just as if the server was on NT. Samba is an implementation of the SMB protocol and works quite nicely.

A more secure solution, and one better for Linux to Linux would be SSH as previously mentioned. You'd simply run kghostview or acroread on the remote machine, forwarding its graphical output out to your local X server and open the PDF on the remote machine without having to download anything.

It's possible to implement the second solution for Win, btw, but it requires additional software. PuTTY for one allows you to use SSH in Win, but for X forwarding you'd need to get an X11 server for Win. All things considered it'd probably easier just to use VNC at that point.

I also meant to include in my previous post that some of the files are also media. Video, audio and the like. Can SSH handle those? I use Putty at work but not for SSH. Just regular telnet sessions to Unix servers and AS/400's.

Can Samba be run over the internet? I have Samba setup for my internal network already and it works great. Something like how Samba works in the internal network only outside across the internet would be perfect. What kind of security risks would I be running into by using Samba outside the network if it's possible?

Thank you for the reply, tk31337! Much appreaciated info!