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On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 8:21 AM, Henry Bremridge <henry.bremridge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Been in two discussions over this, can someone help. > > - I am involved with a charity, and their IT set up drives me nuts > > a) Is it possible, on a windows box, to have one application connect > over a VPN with all other web connections to be via local ISP? Typically, if we use a remote worker scenario, then you would establish a VPN connection from your PC to the "internal network" of your work; if your PC tried to connect to an IP address that's inside your work's LAN then said traffic would go via the VPN. However this only works well if your work IP address range is different to your home IP address range. Some VPN setups will establish the VPN tunnel and make the VPN tunnel your default route - so all traffic goes via the VPN, thus slowing things down dramatically. > b) What would be the ballpark guesstimate cost of: > > 1. Connecting ~ 20 Windows XP currently on a peer to peer network to a > linux server, then storing all user data in subdirectories on > the linux server (full read / write access to all data to all > users). Any additional equipment would need to be bought. I > guess the following would be required > > - Server (although I think there is already a box that could > be used) > - Switch or router > - Some cabling > > Buying basic equipment. (currently all user data is copied to > all other machines using xcopy: its cheap, it works, its a pain) As has been mentioned, a NAS box is a cheap way of doing this. You could alternatively install a Linux distro on some box or other and set it up as a server yourself. If you're not up for doing it manually, you could look at things like sme-server (www.smeserver.org). > 2. Adding email facilities for about 50 user to go out over local > ISP, but making sure two applications access a VPN Email for 50 users? You could run your own mail server, or you could use Google Apps. > (One of the tech volunteers suggested that point 1 would be > impractical because Windows Server purchase and set up costs alone > would be in the region of £5000. When I suggested ubuntu would be > considerably cheaper it was implied I did not know what I was > talking about. There were mutterings about Windows Exchange etc. I > am quite prepared to believe I do not know enough: hence the > question). Sounds like the tech volunteer doesn't necessarily know how things work and that you don't necessarily need Microsoft everything just because you have Microsoft on the desktops. > - What is the performance difference - if any - between sharing > applications on windows with GoToMyPC vs sharing applications on Linux > (debian) with ssh -X .... > > Or would I be correct in assuming that the performance difference > would be negligible X11 over a LAN is ok. X11 over a normal WAN connection is not a good idea, unless you *really* want it. I use LogMeIn for connecting to Windows/Mac machines and VNC for connecting to my own. The nice things about things like LogMeIn is that you don't need to do anything fancy with firewalls. Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html