Hi everyone,

I have a bit of a problem and goes thus:

There is this company with 4 different branch offices all having their private LANS. There are application servers located on the private LAN of the Headquarters that the other branch offices need to access on a daily bases but this is however proving difficult.

This company wants a situation whereby a user on the private LAN of one of the branch offices can have access to all the appication servers located on the private LAN of the Head office.

Of course, the various offices have an internet gateway EACH i.e one system that is connected to the internet and acts as a gateway to the various private LANS.

I would like ur suggestions.However, proposed solutions should be based on linux.VPN may be out of the question.

Thanks in anticipation of a favorable response.

The easiest way to run an application remotely may be to forward a port for ssh and run an application remotely using "ssh -X username@ip_address command".

You can even create a link on the desktop for the application. Edit the properties, by prepending "ssh username@server " to the command. Then when the user clicks on the icon, a password dialog will pop up for the password. After that the program will run, but be displayed on the users local screen.

so if you're in a linux-only environment teach your users ssh ;-)

openvpn might be a possible solution as well. the gateways could run an openvpn tunnel between the subnets using private ip numbers. www.openvpn.org has quite extensive howtos and faqs.

Using vpn would be the most general and probably best solution.

If you use ssh, for windows users, you can do with putty whatever you can do with an ssh client in Linux. Ssh is great at getting instant access to files or applications on another server. For example, using sftp is handy if you don't have a host isn't configured with samba or nfs, or if you need to access a directory that isn't shared.

How are applications started if you are on the same lan? Are the other hosts thin clients? If they are started using rsh, then ssh is what you would want to do the same thing securely.