Accessing Shares from anywhere

Windows Home Server sounds great, but I'd rather trust the open source community than M$. I know that Amahi and Ubuntu Home Server Edition are working on it, but the former is too difficult to install and the latter isn't ready.

All I'm really interested in is being able to access my shared folders from anywhere - I travel frequently, and if I could just access my files across the Internet I'd be happy. I can handle redundancy (via RAID 0) and backups on my own.

But the ability to find my home file server from anywhere is awesome, and I have to say, hats off to M$ if it actually works without complicated setup. Is there any simple way to do this with current open source functionality? Can I do it on any regular home network, or does it require that I get a static IP?

Thanks in advance for your help - I'm pretty new to Linux, so this is new territory to me.

I use two different methods to get access to my home network. First, my laptop has openvpn connection to my router at home (openwrt). This is flexible, cross platform, largely invisible once set up, and would let you use SMB shares and so forth, but requires a bit of setup on the client PC that you probably wouldn't want or get to do on just any computer.

Plan B for quick and dirty access is a ssh server at home and something like winscp portable on a memory stick. Plug it into any old computer and you can copy files to and from your home server. Ssh also lets me do remote admin in a way that knocks the socks off everything else I've tried, but then I like my command line tools.

A static IP address is handy, but since I don't have one I use the free DynDNS service and an update script on my router so I can use an easy to remember domain to find my home computers.

Let us know how you get on,

Chris...

Hmmmm..... Would ssh suffice for you? Is the ability to access your files via ssh enough (you can open up the remote folders with a graphical file browser if you want to drag and drop), or do you really need to have the remote folders mounted?

For dealing with a dynamic IP, check out DynDNS.