VPN advice please

[corned]

Hello all,

My business is getting to the point where my colleagues in other parts of the country need to share resources and access documents which are a pain to have to keep emailing around. Also this required each of us to be available to do the emailing in the first place.

I was thinking of setting up a network drive which would act as a central server and be accessible to the other two people who would need access.

My naive plan was to purchase an external HDD device which has ethernet connectivity, and plug it into my router/hub.

So then what do I do? Can I set up an access control onto this 'server' so that my colleagues have some kind of login to get through, and they simply set up this as a network drive on their computers?

I am confident around computers and networks, but have never had to contemplate this sort of thing before.

All advice very much appreciated! Thanks.

 

[markjay]

For a small organisation, you would be better off opting for a hosted service such as Google Docs, or better still a more commercial one such as www.cobweb.co.uk.


It is of course possible to set-up remote access to your office server for the remote users in various ways:

1. Allow them access to a shared drive on your file server (if you have one), or to an external hard disk drive (NAS)

2. Allow them access to their office PCs using Remote Desktop Client, so they work from home or from a laptop as if they were physically at the office (requires the Professional version of Windows XP/Vista/7 on your office PCs, as opposed to the Home edition)

3. A dedicated Terminal Server will provide simultaneous remote desktop sessions for any number of remote users without having to keep physical PCs at the office for them.


The VPN will provide secure encrypted access, and will simplify a bit the networking side and printing of things (as the remote users will be on the same virtual LAN as the office users), but essentially any of the above can be done simply over the Internet and without a VPN connection.


Having said that - see my comment at the first section....

 

[tagnut]

+1 for hosted service. Hosted SharePoint could work well for documents. A bit difficult to make a recommendation though as you haven't mentioned what network connection you have or how many local and remote users you are talking about and how much shared information we are talking about.

If you have ADSL you could cause congestion problems having to upload documents to other locations due to the limited upstream bandwidth. Also be aware that VPN connections increase bandwidth requirements as well.

On the other hand, if you have plenty of bandwidth there are many different options as has already been pointed out.

 

[moonloops]

+1 hosted again

If your shared storage is less than 2gb then I would simply use dropbox to sync files between all computers. But do have an alternative method of backing up (say to usb drive) just in case

If you need an invite to dropbox let me know as referrals earn extra free space..

 

[tpwuk]

Put it in the clouds my friend!

 

[markjay]

We always used to call it Hosted Services.... rather boring, that. Microsoft came up with the unlikely name SaaS (Software as a Service), that name didn't really catch on, but now everyone calls it Cloud Computing - much more catchy, but at the end of the day a Hosted Service is a just that, a Hosted Service...

 

[corned]

Thanks, guys.

To expand a little on our set up and requirements...

There are three of us, and we all have ADSL connections. We all run MS Office Pro and several other industry related software packages. I am in Nottingham; the others are in St Albans and Derby.

The data intended for this repository is not unduly excessive (in total no more than 3 or 4 GB). It is mainly for a central repository of proposals and quotations, other assorted business documents, lighting plans and plots (we're in the lighting game) so we all have access to each other's documents in case any one of us is ill, busy, on holiday, etc so we can cover for each other.

Expense forms, other HR documentation, and order/invoice details would also probably end up on there too.

I think I like the idea of the hosted service, because I am concerned that if I was to be away on holiday and the office had a power-out, then would a HDD restart itself and get back on-stream? Not confident on that one! We'd be buggered until I got back, I bet.

 

[tagnut]

Sounds like a hosted service is the way to go. Incidentally, I don't know who provides your email but I get 10GB of online storage with my provider (mobile me) as well as my email. I believe a number of email providers do this already so you may not have to buy anything.

 

[markjay]

Mobile Me will not allow you to use your own email domain when sending email online - you must use your Mobile Me email address instead e.g. [email protected]. So it is not very good for businesses.

I understand from talking to the Apple Shop technical guys that this restriction was imposed by Apple in order to not compete with Microsoft's lucrative Exchange business, which the Macs/iPhones/iPdas all support well - in short, if you are a business or corporate user, Apple expects you to subscribe to a Hosted Exchange service rather than use their own Mobile Me.

 

[tagnut]

Mobile Me will not allow you to use your own email domain when sending email online - you must use your Mobile Me email address instead e.g. [email protected]. So it is not very good for businesses.

I understand from talking to the Apple Shop technical guys that this restriction was imposed by Apple in order to not compete with Microsoft's lucrative Exchange business, which the Macs/iPhones/iPdas all support well - in short, if you are a business or corporate user, Apple expects you to subscribe to a Hosted Exchange service rather than use their own Mobile Me.

Thanks, I was thinking more for just hosting documents. I do this for my own pub business which I own with my brother. We can both access latest version of documents from the one place this way instead of emailing backwards and forwards.

 

[crockers]

Rumour was Mobileme was going to be free soon to compete against Google...

 

[gunshy]

Hosted service would be easier to set up and if you get it from a reputable supplier, then you can have a certain degree of confidence that your data is being backed up. I'd suggest sugarsync, you can use it to synchronise files on your local disk, so if sugarsync have downtime, or you loose network connectivity, you still have access to your local files. You can also use sugarsync to share the files easily with people you're collaborating with. There are plenty of other service providers that offer a similar service.

 

[stevesey]

2. Allow them access to their office PCs using Remote Desktop Client, so they work from home or from a laptop as if they were physically at the office (requires the Professional version of Windows XP/Vista/7 on your office PCs, as opposed to the Home edition)

N.B There is a simple registry tweak to turn RDP on on Home Premium editions - useful, but unsupported of course and not strictly within the license terms.

 

[Deker]

There's some info here which might help, I've been looking at setting one up myself to access my home network while I'm out and about.

 

[als]

I'd take a look at Draytek Vigor routers with VPN support. This is a low-cost solution aimed at small businesses that can't afford a Cisco solution.

 

[Sp!ke]

A quick and easy solution would be for you all to use Microsoft Groove prnding a sharepoint deployment or some other cloud based implementation.

 

[prprandall51]

If you have a fixed IP at your office, then setting up a VPN is a piece of cake. It is what we use for out-of -the-office access to our files servers and I set it up so it must be simple.