[Samba] Windows drive mapping using alternate port

[Kris Springer]

I've got 50 remote users possibly doubling in the next year.  The idea is to
map a drive that they have easy and constant access to.  If I tell everyone
to VPN then the traffic on my server's network will go through the roof
since all traffic for everyone will route through the VPN and not their
local networks for regular internet use.  Skype would become unusable as
well as a few other things.  A VPN would be ideal if it were only a few
users that accessed the shares intermittently, but for 50+ users with
constant access it's not really feasible.  Is this starting to sound like a
situation where remote access just isn't going to work?  Is Samba simply a
local file sharing server that isn't really useful in today's remote world?
Is there some other alternative that someone could suggest?

Kris



-----Original Message-----
From: Günter Kukkukk [mailto:linux at kukkukk.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2014 11:53 AM
To: Kris Springer
Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [Samba] Windows drive mapping using alternate port

Am 06.02.2014 20:22, schrieb Kris Springer:
> Help.  I've got an Ubuntu server running fine with Samba.  I can 
> connect remotely using an iPhone app using an alternate port number 
> that I've configured to NAT to port 445 through my firewall.  But, my 
> ISP has blocked port 445 for security reasons and I have no way of 
> Mapping a drive in a remote Windows machine because port 445 is 
> blocked and there doesn't seem to be any way to edit it or use an 
> alternative port number.  I was hoping there's a client software that 
> could resolve this, or some other way of remotely mapping shares to my 
> server.  I do not have any local machines inside the server local 
> network, all the users are remote and work from home.  Right now we're 
> utilizing a cloud share provider but we want to bring everything 
> in-house but I can't seem to get this to work.  L
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Kris
> 

Hi Kris,

due to millions of misconfigured windows machines, nearly all ISPs block all
ports used by the SMB protocol.

So a good way to workaround this is to tunnel all traffic.
For example see:
http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html#samba
Sure, the client must also support this...

Cheers, Günter

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