Mounting samba share over the internet

[kaltag]

Good afternoon. I would like a little help/answer to this question. Is it possible to mount a windows share using samba/smb4k over the internet? Here's my plan. I have a work computer using XP Pro with file sharing enabled. At home I have slackware 9.1 and SAMBA/SMB4K installed. I want to mount the drive at work from home and be able to move files back and forth. I know this can be done with FTP but I was curious is was at all possible through SAMBA. Thank you.

 

[jajmon]

I belive you could do this, but Samba cannot write to an ntfs partition. I would install an ssh server/daemon on your xp box, and then from your linux box you could 'scp' your files. It would be more secure and I think you can 'scp' files to ntfs, not sure though - seems feasable.

 

[Titan386]

Samba can write to NTFS partitions (although Linux can't reliably write to them locally), and you can do what you want over the Internet, provided there are no firewalls between the two computers that might block the traffic. You'll need to know the IP address of the work computer, and specify it when mounting with the ip= option.

This probably isn't a very secure way of sharing files. FTP isn' all that secure either: the passwords and usernames are sent across the Internet in plain text. You might want to look into scp or sftp if security is an issue.

 

[ookabooka]

not necesarily true. If you compile your FTP server for SSL support, it will encrypt the password, but only for ROOT!!, it will use plain text as default, you have to tell it to use ssl for other users, but i don't know how. As far as data encryption though, forget about it, look at ssh or sftp. Samba over the net is disaster waiting to happen. Windows has known to have many security holes in their samba servers, lots of RPC attacks that went through samba. I would suggest putting a sftp server, or ftp with ssl (if you don't care about your data being encrypted). Then you could restrict it your your ISP's subnet, to give u a litle bit more security.

 

[SickBoy]

samba network sharing (whether Windows or Linux) is different than mounting a local partition. You're asking the host computer to read/write/modify/whatever the file rather than doing it yourself. So OS is not an issue.

Making a samba share over the internet would be extremely insecure IMHO. scp/sftp would be better, best would be using an ssh connection to connect to home and ftp'ing files out from the inside rather than out from the outside.

 

[mirko_3]

about sftp... I really looked for it a while ago, but could find almost nothing... I think you activate it from ssh's config file, but other than that... anyone knows a guide?

 

[axlecrusher]

I did something similar using SAMBA, NFS, and SSH. I believe I mounted the SAMBA share on a linux computer local on the same network. Then I tunneled NFS through SSH to reach the NFS server from acros the internet. It was slow and not incrediably useful when you could use SFTP.

Axle

 

[engjohn]

Whynt configure the winxp or linux machine to accept incoming pptp connections. It will encrypt the data over the tunnel (you have to enable encryption in linux). Then you can mount the samba share over the pptp connection....