On 18/11/2011 16:20, Vic wrote:
> OpenVPN has a lot to recommend it. But the first question I would ask is
> this: what, exactly, are you trying to enable with this tunnel?
With hindsight I should have said at the start, but I thought the VPN
should be a relatively minor issue.
The company for which I work has recently been spun off from it's parent
and is in new premises as of six weeks ago, with a new Win-SBS server.
At essentially the same time, I began to work mostly from home, instead
of in the office.
I have on their new server a substantial amount of data for electronics
CAD, software, documentation, svn repositories and so on, which at
present I access through the proffered PPTP link. That works after a
fashion, but the link is too slow. Sometimes that's just frustrating,
sometimes worse as, for example, the CAD times out waiting for svn
checkins to complete, even on only modestly large files. The
bottle-necks are the uplink speeds at both ends, of around 1.2Mbps.
Now I have two perfectly good fileservers here, both running proper(tm)
operating systems (Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS), one as a working server,
the other I plan to use as a back-up mirror to the first.
What I want to do is to copy all my data from the corporate server to my
own server; use my own server for all the workaday activity, then
overnight, synchronise my server's data with the company's server data.
Overnight means I'm not swamping the limited uplink bandwidth when
others are also trying to use it, and also means any large transfers can
be done off-tarrif on my DSL. As a very useful side-effect, I also get
good spatial redundancy of the data ... in the company's offices, in my
home office, in my 'off-site' backup server (actually my garage, which
is separated from the main house by some very significant firewalling),
and also on the external drives that the company feels are sufficient
for backup. They do at least take those off-site.
Little oddities that add to this .. we have an ACT! crm system with
which I'm expected to synchronise, which is presently on a fileserver at
the parent company on another VPN link (Cisco). Hopefully ACT! will
eventually collocate with the company's fileserver. But that's all
Windoze and as I'm mostly on Linux here, I may just ignore it.
I do sometimes need access to other data on the server, though not that
much. I'm in two minds whether to mirror everything so I have that here
also, or just my own stuff and access the other stuff by VPN when I need to.
As an aside, I also have some external cloud storage, but that's
available for Windoze only and suffers the same uplink issues as the
VPN. I turned that off the other day when it was some 1700 files behind
my work.
Company email is the usual Microsoft klutz, which I presently access
from here with a web browser.
Kind regards,
Gordon.
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