Slightly OT: Sharing files between people across the US.

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

> Sorry in my late response.
> On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>
>> >
>> > My additional techie requirements are:
>> > * Cheap
>>
>> What is "cheap?"
>
> Where I don't have to double their DSL costs because I need SDSL + Static
> IPs, along with buying a new server.
>
>> > * Secure
>> How secure?
>
> Usual fare, non plaintext passwords, preferably something thats encrypted
> a la SSH.

Well, a "free" VPN can be had with SSH.

If you enable port forwarding, you can have "proxy" servers ssh into the
main server and forward the ports you want exported. Look at the "-L
port:host:hostport" option.

Say you have 4 machines:

USER is the users machine.
REMOTE is the remote client server.
PROXY is the main proxy server.
SERVER is the target server.

To forward, say PostgreSQL, over the SSH port, do something like this:

(on REMOTE)
ssh -C -L 5432:SERVER:5432 PROXY

(On CLIENT)
psql -h REMODE mydeb


Notes:
Make sure that SSH allows forwarded ports to be public. (forget where that
config is)
I use the "-C" (compression) switch, it generally speeds things up. The
CPU time is expended by REMOTE and PROXY.

It is free and secure.

I've used this with PostgreSQL and Oracle. It should work with CVS and
others.