how to get remote access to my source files?
 

howdy,

i have two different networks in town. one Lan (location A) and one Lan/Wan (location B). Location A has the raided hard drives that contain all of our source files. Location B needs to have access to these drives. Within each location, i use the afp protocol to network the machines (all various macs),but i cannot get the afp protocol to work from A to B. I do not need remote control (such as with ARD). I simply need access to the files at A from B. Any and all suggestions would be great.

cheers

What kind of internet connection do you use at each location? If you use a router of some kind to "share" your internet connection it can be a bit tricky... you have to map ports to specific IP addresses.

Here is what I think you are saying, please point out anything wrong... Location A has a machine with a RAID set up connected to the internet, that also acts as a file server to all machines at Location A. Location B is just a bunch of machines that need access to that RAID at Location A.

Is that right? The main question is how to expose your RAID to the internet, so knowing how that machine is set up will help....

I think the easiest/best solution is to setup a FTP server on the file server.
If it's Mac OS X, it'll have FTP built-in. You just need to go inside the control panel and enable it (under file sharing, or networking, or something else).

On your router, you may need to forward port 21 to the file server computer.
The file server should get a static IP address. Google for how to set this up.

Another way to get things to work is to setup a VPN, but it's more expensive and complicated and there's really no point to it.
you'll need FTP clients on the other computers. Filezilla might do it (it's free). Otherwise there are bunch of decent FTP clients for Mac.

howdy and thanks for the responses,

mark--you are correct. The RAID is connected through a netgear router and a westell DSL modem. the machines that need to access the RAID are on an airport extreme hub and a motorola cable modem. I am currently researching how to map ports at www.portforward.com....havent quite got it to work though.

glenn--i was looking into ftp but i am not sure it will fit my needs. For that matter, i am not sure anything will. I'd like to not have to transfer the files from the RAID to the machines at location B. Ideally, the machines at location B would be able to mount the raid and just reconnect the media files. I hope this is possible but do not know for sure.

thank you all for your insight

cheers
-adam

Adam, are you trying to edit video over the internet by any chance? (Sorry if I can't read, but it sounds like you are trying to do that.) You will be limited by your internet connection speeds between A and B. It would still be possible if you have the video files at both locations.

What exactly are you trying to do?

glenn,


you are correct about trying to edit over the net. I fear connection speeds aren't quick enough yet to do this efficiently. time to buy more drives to get the files in both locations....

cheers
-adam

If you want to be adventurous, you can use offlineRT for the files at one location (to save on having to buy more hard drives; doesn't allow internet editing).

However: OfflineRT may not work perfectly. You'll need to use the media manager, which may media mangle odd format footage like 24p and things like that.

If it's DV then just get more drives.