RichB

We have some Macs in our office running Leopard.
We have an Airport Extreme base station.
We are all connected through one ethernet switch which is connected into a network run by the people who we rent space from.
They have servers, firewalls and IP phones.
They have a static IP address.

We want to be able to access files on an external disk on the iMac remotely.
The iMac has file sharing on.

What are the options here?
VPN
iChat
VNC
Timbuktu
Some sort of telnet/ssh type thing

We do not want to have to use some sort of remote backup (Mozy/Dropbox) system.

I probably need something that allows us to configure a port number to connect over as it is likely that the service we choose is already in use by our 'landlords'

We can request certain ports are mapped to our internal IP addresses.

How can I connect up to the iMac from home?

Thanks for any assistance..

Rich

Markus

If all they need is file access then VNC would possibly be overkill. Initial thought would be to enable SMB filesharing on the mac and share the external. This would use normal SMB port numbers, so you'd need to open those up and obviously firewalls would need to allow the incoming users access.

VNC is possibly going to be the best route, question is, how many people will be connected at the same time, as there will be fights over who has control otherwise.

What about FTP/SFTP? That could be a better solution. You could install a proper FTP server on the mac (I'm using PureFTPDManager on 10.5). I am fairly sure you can specify the port to be used in the GUI, if not, the config files should allow you to change this. You'd then just need a half decent FTP client that allows you to spec the port, I'd have thought most would allow this via the url specification of:

if not an option somewhere in the connection dialog.

RichB

Thanks Marcus, FTP might be the way forward

There is only two of us and I occasionally need files from the other guys machine when I'm at home so this is nothing complicated.

Markus

FTP would at least allow a GUI like experience, whereas SSH would be all shell based, ok, looks good to be a geek, but a right pain when you just want to transfer a few files as you'd need to probably use scp.