Connecting To Samba Over The Internet ...

[michael-r]

Hi everyone:

I know I know ... you're all going to shoot me when I tell you that we have a Linux box running Debian 3.1, we have Samba installed, and we've been connecting to Samba shares directly over the Internet. It's not the best idea, but frankly, we do it seldom, and we've done it for a few years, and have never had any problems, knock on plastic. But, a few weeks ago, that all changed .......

It appears that Charter Networks, the company that provides high speed access to many of our teachers, has now blocked ports 139 and 445. We have a few teachers who occasionally want access to their files from home, and they have laptops running MacOSX 10.3.9 They've not been able to connect at all. For grins, we did a port scan test on one of their computers, and the only ports it shows as "open" are: 427, 515, 548, and 631.

What other options would we have to get them access to their files that would be easy to set up and easy for them to navigate? I'd be very happy to try whatever suggestions the board could give me.

Thanks for the help.

[framp]

... It's not the best idea, but frankly, we do it seldom, and we've done it for a few years, and have never had any problems, knock on plastic. ...

I just configured a Linux honeypot with samba, http and ssh. Whenever I set the honypot online I get samba requests after about 15 minutes...

Anyhow: I would setup a VPN connection (I suggest OpenVPN). That's a safe way to use samba connections. But you have to check whether the OpenVPN port is open. Another way would be to use ssh port forwarding. But that's much more trickier and I don't know whether your teachers will get this done

[Lazydog]

Most ISP's are only blocking the well known ports <1025. You should be able to configure OpenVPN to use a port that the ISP is not blocking.