Is Samba for lans only?

[coper]

Hi,

I have a friends domain that I currently host on my linux box running web,dns. She has asked if it is possible for her and a friend to share ms word and excell files on her webspace but not having to use ftp. What she wants is more like a lan file server setup. I have read that samba would work but I see nothing on setting this up so she and her friends can share files over the net using my web server as a file server as well.
Can samba work over the net using domain authentication like ftp does?

Thanks

 

[cyoung]

The only way that this will work is if both machines are in the same network as, by design, the protocol used by Windows networking is not routable across different networks. There is a way to get this to work, but it will require setting up your Samba machine to be a WINS server.

The very thought of doing something like this across the network is nothing but a huge sercurity nightmare --- in other words, don't do it!

There are ways of sharing the file, (Yahoo used to have file space) but I don't think that they will be able to use the file at the same time.

Good Luck with it!

 

[urgl]

Hi Coper,

using samba over the net is not a good idea. It's not designed to be a secure and reliable WAN service. In theory you could use it but I would never ever try it myself.
I'd rather use a web application like phpShare to share files on your server.

CU

Hans

 

[coper]

Thanks for your concurring replies. I am looking into beeweeb.com but have emailed them twice asking a simple question but they have yet to reply. So support could be an issue right off the bat.

Thanks again for the info I will heed your advice and persue another way to do it. I suggested to them to let me give them a windows box on it's own ip(firewalled of course) that they can share using pcanywhere or something along that path. It sure would be nice to allow remote access to a pc using htaccess or something.

Thanks again...