VPNs
Ok, so I'm brand new to macs this week.
So far I love it. I need some help on VPNs though. There are lots of you knowledgeable types on here who might be willing to help me, so I'm asking before I give up.
I was given a brand new iMac to do my job from home. There are three of us working together, all in different home offices in different locations around the U.S. and we need a way to all have access to the same files. I have been given the task of making that happen. I read that the OSX I have on here is perfectly capable of performing as a server version for less than 10 users at a time as long as I went through the steps to enable those capabilities manually or run a program like iVPN. I decided to give iVPN a try. I gave the mac a static assigned address on my LAN and told my router to pass connections on TCP port 1723 and UDP ports 1701, 4500 and 500 to that address. I created three users in iVPN and made sure connecting users would be assigned addresses that would never conflict with assignments from my router to computers on my LAN. I asked someone who is running Vista on their machine in another state to give it a try before I announced I'd done it. She was able to log in just fine. When my father (my boss, lol) tried it he couldn't connect. He's on a Mac too. Any thoughts, or am I an idiot who just needs to pay a professional to figure this out for us?
7 Comments
rougyWish I could help you, New Mexican woman.
Maybe the safest and easiest way to do it would be to share a common FTP site.
I'm sure there are cooler ways to do it, perhaps even orgasmic examples of file protocol, from one nasty computer to another...but these are dark times we're living in, and one must be wary of the evil hackers preying upon our collectivist vulnerabilities.....
FTP is pretty easy. Filezilla. Load file up. Pull file down.
Methinks.
laura^yeah, that's my backup plan and now that you mention it, seems a hell of a lot easier. I just didn't want to have to teach them something new to them...but it's not that bad...
& what the heck is up with the orgasmic talk? lol
Thanks for the suggestion though, Mr.-Rougy-pants.
blankfistI've never tried this, so I doubt I'd be much help. Googling open source VPNs for OSX is probably a good place to start if you want a turnkey system. Googling OSX and VPN I found this: http://chrisp.de/en/rsrc/osx_vpn.html
lucky760Forget all that brouhaha. DropBox is the perfect solution and it works on all platforms (even Droid and iPhone).
It just installs a folder on your computer that is synchronized every other place you have your DropBox account setup. For example, you have a folder like "dropbox/our_files/" filled with a bunch of files you need to share. Your compatriots across the globe install DropBox and they have the same "our_files" directory on their computers. Any time you or any of them add a file to the folder, it automagically appears in the same folder on everyone else's computer. Likewise, any time you delete a file, it disappears from everyone else's computer.
It's a pretty great service and starts with 2GB free (you can upgrade to 50GB for $10/mo). Either all of the other users can install DropBox and login with your credentials -or- you can create your shared folder and just share it with select individuals (and it will be sync'd in their own DropBox folders).
StormsingerI've next to no experience with Macs and OSX, but plenty with networked groups. I have to point out that what service or product you need, depends a great deal on precisely what you mean when you say "access the same files". If you mean "read the same files", then dropbox should work fine. If you intend to have multiple people editing the same file at the same time, you might have problems with that approach (such as overwriting each other's changes). Then you'll want to look at something like a real source control system (think Subversion, Perforce, etc).
laura*discard
siftbotDiscarding this post - discard requested by original submitter laura.
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