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.
Your first thing to implement should be VPN. Then you'll be "on the
local network" even though you're at a remote location. This should
be done at the network borders of these remote sites. This is not the
user based VPN of OS X Server however but one for the whole networks.
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.
Well it's as fast as your link. If it's not fast enough, and you
require remote access, upgrade.
I'm looking for a solution that would be
'faster' —in general, I'd expect some users would still be slower than
others based on their connection—more secure, stable, cross platform,
and not super expensive to set-up. We can purchase some software and
items, but if it costs more than say a Mac OS X Server Unlimited
Server license, then its debatable if would could do it.
Beyond that there are distributed filesystems such as Andrew, which
was already mentioned, but these really are designed to solve a
different problem than what you are asking for. So it's not going to
offer much to solve your issue and may even exacerbate it.
You could consider replicating and synchronizing certain data and
files. But if your issue is one requiring remote access to remote
resources you need to improve your connections.
