NAS question....

[Gr44]

Need a little advise please!

I've been stitched up by the manager at work who wants me to do a few jobs on his PC's and such... installing XP on 2 machines + laptops which is easy enough...

The other main thing is the following though;

He has 1 main PC in his house, and his daughter has a laptop in another house. They both need to access the same files for business reasons... so they need to be shared - and also act as form of backup.

What I was thinking is the following;

Buy a NAS, single drive to plug straight into his router. He has a dynamic IP, but the router supports the DNS update lark on opendns or whatever the website is....

So get him a free domain and setup the router to auto update, which I think I'll be able to figure out fairly easily!

Then the question is, what software to use on both PC's to actually access the NAS - both locally and over the WAN...

Help/Suggestions pretty please?

[Funkstar]

Accessing the NAS on your bosses side is easy, it's just windows networking.

I guess if the right ports are forwarded (though i don't know what they would be) you could in theory go to \\dyndns_site\ from a remote location.

Security is going to be non-existant though. some sort of VPN is probably the best idea.

[Saracen]

What sort of volume of files? What sort of access? Does it need to be simultaneous? Is downloading a file, working on it and re-uploading it an option? If so, what about a small hosting account and secure FTP? Or running an FTP server locally?

If, for example, one person prepares a quote, or report, or spreadsheet, and some time later, the other amends it, then the above type of file store might work. If there's hundreds or thousands of files and they all need to be pretty much instantly accessible, then it probably won't.

For instance, without going into too much detail, I run a document storage system for a client. Mainly, it's forms, procedures and technical documentation to which a bunch of engineers need access 24/7, and perhaps from anywhere in the country, and for which the quality requirements of an ISO QA audit require an effective distribution system, and proper version control. I do it with a remote server, and it works very elegantly, but largely because access is frequent, but unpredictable and sporadic.

Anyway, it's just a thought for a possible alternative to a NAS.

[Moby-Dick]

What sort of volume of files? What sort of access? Does it need to be simultaneous? Is downloading a file, working on it and re-uploading it an option? If so, what about a small hosting account and secure FTP? Or running an FTP server locally?

If, for example, one person prepares a quote, or report, or spreadsheet, and some time later, the other amends it, then the above type of file store might work. If there's hundreds or thousands of files and they all need to be pretty much instantly accessible, then it probably won't.

For instance, without going into too much detail, I run a document storage system for a client. Mainly, it's forms, procedures and technical documentation to which a bunch of engineers need access 24/7, and perhaps from anywhere in the country, and for which the quality requirements of an ISO QA audit require an effective distribution system, and proper version control. I do it with a remote server, and it works very elegantly, but largely because access is frequent, but unpredictable and sporadic.

Anyway, it's just a thought for a possible alternative to a NAS.

I do various different flavours of this exact thing for my firm ( on a large scale with auditors all over the globe )

is there an open source version of sharepoint that would work for this ?

[Funkstar]

is there an open source version of sharepoint that would work for this ?

I really want to get sharepoint sorted out for work. We have a completely manual document management system at the moment and it's a nightmare. And so is the woman that runs it!

I'm sure sharepoint would integrate pretty well with out AX/CRM system

[PeteSmith]

Gr44, I'm sure a basic NAS box from the likes of Synology or QNAP will suit your needs, they both have detailed web ui, which allows the users to login and access file shares over the net - permissions can be set on folders or at file level. The web ui also means no 3rd party software needs installing on eiher machine.

Setting up OpenDNS is very easy, once your have created your account you just need to forward a port from the router to your NAS box.

[Gr44]

It's just for his small company... they could do with accessing at the same time though, or atleast very easy to upload as I don't think either of them are very IT literate!

I'll have a look at those, thanks PeteSmith!

[Moby-Dick]

I really want to get sharepoint sorted out for work. We have a completely manual document management system at the moment and it's a nightmare. And so is the woman that runs it!

I'm sure sharepoint would integrate pretty well with out AX/CRM system

You can probably do that with the basic sharepoint services - dont think you even need to go with the full blown version

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

[Funkstar]

You can probably do that with the basic sharepoint services - dont think you even need to go with the full blown version

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

I need to bring it up at a staff meeting sometime, but i'll need to wait until everyone has settled into using AX first, thats confused a few people

[pumpman]

how about using dropbox ? http://www.getdropbox.com/

[Gr44]

Thanks VM for the help.

The dropbox looks like the best option with a NAS just to back it up (paranoia!)

Ta =)

[Georgy291]

i had a NAS thingy before in m house, i bought a cheap £15 HDD enclosure to play around with, plugs in to your router, router assighns IP,

your nas apears on your network at home.....easy

As for WAN it was simple to

log in to the NAS drive and set up a account, log in to the router and forward i think it was port 25, it said on the nas box

forward the port to your router

then anywhere in the world with internet in the internet explorer in the adress bar type in

FTP://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where the Xs is the ip off the router your internet provider gives you, it asks for a user (the one you reated earlyer) and it opens up like a folder

i have tiscali, they are also dynamic but as long as there is no power cut ip wont change

hope it helps