On Oct 29, 2007, at 10:39 AM, Alnisa Allgood wrote:
I'm looking for ideas and or best practices for implementing remote
access for file-sharing purposes.
I'm working with a nonprofit that is growing, and the result of that
growth is having staff members with home offices in other locations
(DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Connecticut, etc.). The primary office is
in San Francisco.
The primary office is all Macs, with one Windows XP machine running
mailing software (UPS, USPS, and FedEx).
<snip>
There maybe one Mac OS 9 user somewhere, but I'm not
terribly concern about them, we can force an upgrade if need be.
Currently, users are using AFP with an IP address to mount the file
storage area remotely. As you can imagine this can be extremely slow
for the remote users.
<snip>
Any ideas? What are other people doing to handle these types of
issues?
I think that you might want to look into Andrew File System (AFS), it
allows for most of what you are talking about, and can be a free,
cross-platform solution. It is a little more up-front work (probably),
but it allows people to seamlessly have file replicated on their
machines, which might kill the speed problem you are having, and can
have replicated file servers.
I have not really played with it much, but it is in active use on
multiple large installations, and has an active developer community
behind it. I would look at the OpenAFS project:
