[Samba] best way to access samba shares remotely without VPN

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Chris Weiss <cweiss at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Janantha Marasinghe
> <jananthadm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm wondering what is the best way to access samba shares securely over
> the
> > net. I saw sslbridge and davenport but they don't seem to be managed
> > properly. I was thinking of using webdav via https. I dont want to use
> VPN
> > as im using openvpn and it is not support well with Mac iOS and OSX
> client.
> > webdav is supported well.
> >
>
> webdav would be not using samba at all, unless you mean having a web
> server smb mount a samba share and export that via webdav, but that's
> indirectly samba.  You could also just use a php/python/ruby/whatever
> based web file manager
>

I've had good success with the WebDAV approach. It supports
built-in directory access control, unlike SCP or SFTP, and is accessible
from all web capable clients for read access, and for plenty of portable
high quality clients for web access. I highly recommend it to repolace FTP,
FTPS, and SFTP, especially since it runs well on the normal HTTPS port,
which is much easier to manage in normal corporate firewall and proxy
setups. (You don't have to get special setups or permission)

It doesn't give the gind of fileystem permissions management that CIFS
supported by Samba, or that NFS or other such tools would.

>