sharing storage over the internet

[sgrinavi]

I need to set up some sort of hardware to share a drive across the internet with a couple people. We would all assign a drive letter and share the drive in real time, much the same as you would for a networked drive.

Will a simple NAS do the trick? Can I do something simple for $500ish?

 

[mv2devnull]

The first thing that you do need, is a public IP address. Something that machines can find over the net by name. Something to arrange with your ISP.

Second, file sharing across WAN means more lag than in LAN. That may, or may not, be annoying.

Third, traffic will be routed. Windows sharing protocol, SMB, is not very good at it. Not to mention that every router along the route might watch what gets passed. So clear connection is unnerving. VPN solves that, but adds some lag.


Therefore, I would put the public IP to a routing firewall, that supports VPN. You might even have one already.

A client on the outside forms a VPN connection to the router. Then the client connects to the file-sharing device via the VPN tunnel. Some routers do offer a "connect a USB drive and I'll share it with SMB" feature. If not, then a NAS. The size (and price and speed) is up to you.

A client inside, on the LAN, connects to the file-sharing device directly.

 

[Zap]

You can go with a combo device/service like Pogoplug. It is a NAS-like device that supports sharing over the internet.

 

[sgrinavi]

You can go with a combo device/service like Pogoplug. It is a NAS-like device that supports sharing over the internet.

That's what's I am talking about! thanks!

 

[Gooberlx2]

You could all just connect to the same hamachi network, which is just a secure VPN that's simple to setup. Then do a network share like normal. Simple storage servers can be pretty cheap to build.

 

[Dadofamunky]

You could all just connect to the same hamachi network, which is just a secure VPN that's simple to setup. Then do a network share like normal. Simple storage servers can be pretty cheap to build.

That's a good suggestion too. But you want something bulletproof and as secure as possible. Also, obviously, the fatter the pipe, the lower the latency.

 

[Gooberlx2]

That's a good suggestion too. But you want something bulletproof and as secure as possible. Also, obviously, the fatter the pipe, the lower the latency.

The good thing about hamachi is that it is managed (explicitly authorize members) and encrypted. It may also run on arbitrary, or at least non-traditional VPN ports...not sure about that one though.

 

[Tom]

Why do you want to do this rather than sharing some kind of internet based storage ?

I'm just asking what the advantages/disadvantages of sharing both ways are,if anyone wants to chime in ?

 

[dorion]

If you are sharing files over the internet you can make a simple FTP server, running a protocol like SMB that expects a low latency connection that you find in a LAN is just asking for slow speeds. Large businesses even have trouble running SMB over their WAN because some of the links are to offices where you no longer have sub 10 millisecond latency.

 

[sgrinavi]

Why do you want to do this rather than sharing some kind of internet based storage ?

I'm just asking what the advantages/disadvantages of sharing both ways are,if anyone wants to chime in ?

We've been playing with various 'sync based' internet based file sharing , it's not real time and it gets problematic. For example, we had sync'd directory shared by two users, one of them took his USB drive that contained his shared files, plugged it into another computer and installed the syncing software. When he did the sync software made a subdirectory of the same name in the original directory. After three days we had 6 levels deep each with a synced copy of the entire mess.

At least it was sync'd and we didn't lose any data.

SO, I would go for a managed server, but considering that we only have a few users I don't think it makes sense from a cost standpoint.

Do you guys know of any good, managed, servers out there that we could get for say 10ish dollars per month per user? We can get away with under 500 GB of drive space.