Share folder over internet

[Chuck Swiger]

On Aug 16, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Laszlo Nagy wrote:
>> You need to create a VPN connection between your two offices.  You  
>> can do this in a variety of ways, but probably the best solution  
>> would be to have static IP's for both offices and a router that  
>> has hardware support for VPNs at each office.  You can connect the  
>> two offices via a VPN connection from router to router.
>
> Well, we do not have static IP addresses, and the routers does not  
> support VPN. Also I do not like the idea of VPN because I feel that  
> would forward more packets than needed. I may be wrong. :-)

A properly-configured VPN setup uses what Cisco calls a "split  
config", where only traffic addressed to the subnet on the other side  
of the VPN actually goes through the VPN tunnel; normal traffic sent  
elsewhere goes out your normal default route.  Some people have  
experienced VPN setups where all traffic goes through the tunnel, and  
those do indeed forward more traffic than they should.

> Although we do not have static IP, we have DDNS. Is it possible to  
> do VPN from one FreeBSD box to another and then.... what? Mount  
> nfs? Mount smb? I can mount a remote smb volume then share it with  
> another smb server, but it looks wreid to me and I'm also concerned  
> about speed. I believe smb is not optimized for speed. If I have to  
> use VPN then I would like to use the most traffic-efficient method  
> over VPN. Can you suggest something?

Your goal to do filesharing safely over the Internet is best  
satisfied by having a VPN between two static netblocks, or at least  
individual IPs.  openvpn makes a decent solution for FreeBSD, but if  
you're not willing to get static IPs and configure a VPN, well, then  
you probably need to re-evaluate your goals.

-- 
-Chuck