[Fedora] Re: Outside access

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 13:48 -0600, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> Mark Haney wrote:
> > You can use cygwin/ssh.  We do that all the time.
>     While I agree with this, there's a very (VERY) high probability that 
> the outside person would need something graphical on their end.  And (at 
> the moment) not knowing what platform they're on - I'm waiting for an 
> e-mail reply - I can't even begin to offer solutions.  But I figured if 
> i can at least get the ball rolling here, it might give me some ideas of 
> how best to approach this problem.
> 
>     Preferred would be some drag-n-drop interface on their machine.  
> Whether they're on Windows or Mac, they would need to have access to a 
> specific folder on our (Windows) file server (which in and by itself is 
> another headache since the file server does not employ any kind of user 
> login, it's just set up for guest access and any John, Jane, and Jekyll 
> in the building can access it and everything on it.)
> 
>     Another possibility I thought of was to have an specific (user) 
> folder on one of our internet servers (FC5) and have them ftp into 
> that.  Then through samba, have that folder also available on our 
> internal network.  This protects against outside access all the way into 
> our network, but does require me to do a bit more legwork.

It sounds like you'd like this person to be in your building and just
use your wide open Windows share. Well - they can be, sort of. You could
use openvpn (which is cross-platform and hence will be OK if they are
using Windows/Linux/Mac) and they're effectively sat on your network.
They can then use whatever their favourite file management tool is.

If course, this could also give them access to any other open service on
your network, so it would depend on how close your relationship with
them was as to whether this was a viable approach.

Paul.