Vpn Remote Hardrive

[SteelheadDan]

Hi :turned:

This is my first post. Thanks for having me as part of this community and for all the help!

I'd like to pose my problem and ask for some advice on how to proceed:

I work for a small company, that has 2 teams of construction technicians. I do most of the IT for our company. I'm very good with basic networking, computer reformatting, building computers, and general day to day IT issues that we encounter. Basically, my company would like to set up a server, so that our 2 field teams and some of the bosses can share pictures, spreadsheets, and collaborate on field reports. This seems very basic but I don't know how to implement these objectives. When I was in College, we had a personal drive that I could access from my home. The way I gained access, was to vpn into the server and then I could access the drive from "My computer". Here are my questions:

-How could I implement this? How do I set up a VPN? Do I need to set up a VPN? I basically need a shared hard drive to show up on my tech's labtops in their "my computer", when the teams are out of town. That way they can take pictures of the site, and upload them to some sort of centralized location?
-Do I need a server to do this? I was looking at building a server and then getting Server 2008. Server 2008 is expensive! I just need to know how to implement a shared hard drive and if you need $700 worth of software to do it

At another job, I used to use Server 2003 to remote desktop into the server to use Peachtree to add invoices. I guess I could do that for our field techs too, but I'm not sure that is necessary. Once again, all we need is to just share a hard drive that is accessible to our people outside of our office network.

Thanks for the help! I'm sure this is a basic questions, but I appreciate any and all comments or feedback.

Best,
Daniel

 

[ICTCity]

Hi and welcome,

There are many way to do this. First of all you could tell us what you have (hw and sw) that can be used.

Basically I can see 4 scenarios:
1) Buy a NAS with remote access
2) Use SharePoint
3) Install SRV 2k8 and set up remote access
4) Use SkyDrive

tell me what you have and I will give you the best solution (for me).

 

[SteelheadDan]

Hi and welcome,

There are many way to do this. First of all you could tell us what you have (hw and sw) that can be used.

Basically I can see 4 scenarios:
1) Buy a NAS with remote access
2) Use SharePoint
3) Install SRV 2k8 and set up remote access
4) Use SkyDrive

tell me what you have and I will give you the best solution (for me).

Hi,

Thank you for your prompt reply! The equipment we have, is basic home/office computers.

-We have 2 desktops (an AMD quad, and AMD dual core)
-2 Acer laptops (these are what the field teams have)
-1 Dell laptop.
-All computers are less than 2 years old and are running various versions of Windows 7.
-For Backup, I have a 1 TB USB external HD that automatically backs up the main desktop computer once a week.
-All computers, when at the office are networked on the same workgroup with basic printer and file sharing.
-We have a basic home-grade Belkin wireless router, and a better than basic cable internet connection.

Just basic home/office equiptment! That's why I wanted advice, it seems like we are going to have to purchase additional hardware, and I just want to make the right decision and not spend too much for something we won't utilize to it's full potential (i.e builing a computer, then spending $700 on server software).

I really like the idea of the NAS. Per your suggestion, I'm looking into making sure one can be accessed simultaneously by multiple users. Can you verify that this is possible?

The Sharepoint and SkyDrive seem OK, but I would rather not have to make everyone "upload" every document, all the time. An example of why I would not want this, is if one of the teams comes back from a job, it could be easier for them to transfer 60+ job-site pictures locally to our "storage location", than to have them wait for that many pictures to upload to a cloud like environment. I don't really have that much experience with cloud environments. So if someone would like to chime in on there pros/cons I would appreciate it.

Thanks for all the help! I really appreciate everyone spending time to answer my questions. Additional comments are welcome and will be much appreciated...

(Edit: I just completed my research on NAS systems. It seems like they are very slow to access and download stored files. Could someone explain the steps or point me in the direction to setting up a server running server 2008? Would the best route be to have people remote into the computer, or is there a way to set it up to where they just see the server hard-drive remotely if the click on the "computer" icon. I have used both of these methods, but I have no clue how the later was implemented...)

 

[ICTCity]

IMHO, buy a server / NAS has no sense for you.

NAS are not slow, but you must buy a REAL NAS, with at least 2 disks and a good controller (300-400$) the main problem is your network speed, this impact performances.

Now, sharepoint is a good solution but it's sooo expensive!


SkyDrive has 25 gb of free space and can be accessed everywhere without external software. Permissions are easy to set up and it can be mapped as a network drive!

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7903/how-to-add-your-windows-live-skydrive-to-explorer/

if you don't want to install 3rd party software:

http://mynetx.net/2352/how-to-connect-your-skydrive-in-windows-explorer

It works, and works well.

The only drawback is the network speed, but this is a problem for each method when you access a resource remotely. What I like of this method is the "responsability", your network CANNOT determine the speed of the transfer, when people try to access files outside your office, the speed is determined by their connection.
Another good point is that you can access this drive both from inside and outside the network, without setting up anything special to your firewall / router!

 

[Mysterchr]

I do think that I should throw this out there despite the fact that this is a WINDOWS forum but their are also free software alternatives such as linux servers where the price of software is free but hardware would still cost you. You're not looking for much, it's not like you need a dual quad core with 16 gigs of ram. You won't be running ad, dns, or even dhcp. It might take a bit of research on your part but you could obtain a simple regular desktop PC, install linux, setup a vpn on it and then shared storage folders.

You can also do this on any windows server platform but that would be more expensive. But their are benefits to paying for the more expensive option of course. You have five computers lets double that and say ten users, if all ten jump on to a dual core with 4 gigs of ram (which i think should be standard for all desktops) you won't see to much of a down grade in performance.

My last suggestion would be for you to just take that "main" desktop of yours and installing hamchi's free vpn. It's free because you have less then ten computers. More then that and it's not free. Install hamachi on all of those pc's and create a hamchi network. Then create file shares that can be shared out through that hamachi connection.

 

[ICTCity]

I do think that I should throw this out there despite the fact that this is a WINDOWS forum but their are also free software alternatives such as linux servers where the price of software is free but hardware would still cost you. You're not looking for much, it's not like you need a dual quad core with 16 gigs of ram. You won't be running ad, dns, or even dhcp. It might take a bit of research on your part but you could obtain a simple regular desktop PC, install linux, setup a vpn on it and then shared storage folders.

You can also do this on any windows server platform but that would be more expensive. But their are benefits to paying for the more expensive option of course. You have five computers lets double that and say ten users, if all ten jump on to a dual core with 4 gigs of ram (which i think should be standard for all desktops) you won't see to much of a down grade in performance.

My last suggestion would be for you to just take that "main" desktop of yours and installing hamchi's free vpn. It's free because you have less then ten computers. More then that and it's not free. Install hamachi on all of those pc's and create a hamchi network. Then create file shares that can be shared out through that hamachi connection.

Yes but...

You should think at the backup... skydrive is already backedup.
You should think at the bandwidth... skydrive is hosted on Microsoft's servers so this is not your problem .
You should think at availability... skydrive (should) be more available than a "home made" server, just because it's clustered.
You should think at disponibility... skydrive can be used everywhere (also on Windows Phone 7 phones).

Your idea works, but pay attention at the points written above