Remote Access

[ajbritton]

I'm sure some of you clever people out there have set up remote access to your school systems in one way or another. I'm a bit daunted by the whole prospect. Any advice on how best to do this would be helpful. Here's what I need to achieve...

1 - Remote file access (upload / download) files

2 - Network access (I suppose a VPN) to allow SIMS.NET access from remote site

3 - Web access for sites with Exchange to enable remote access to email

4 - (Possibly) Terminal Services access mostly for SIMS FMS until it's integrated with SIMS.NET

[Dos_Box]

What is your internet connection (through who and what speed)? We in Lancashire are investigating reverse proxying, but the security issues of giving your pupils IP level access are horrendous, but they will need access eventually. Its at times like this I envy Ric and his Citrix setup.

[Ric_]

Indeed, my aim is to use Citrix so that I have remote access to my network - that way I can stay in bed and work from there (there must be a way to divert my office phone to my mobile!).

If you have a publically accessible IP at the moment (e.g. the outside of an ISA box) you could quite cheaply implement Terminal Services (about £9 for a TS CAL) and use OWA for access to exchange. FTP is also a possibility.

Really it all depends on whether your idea is to allow remote administration or remote access for lusers.

[mark]

Powys are now using reverse proxy for remote access. Our school has this to our email server [a squirrell box]. Our web servers [county hosted] are only accessible internally. A few schools have thier own vpn devices that county use reverse proxy to connect to as well.

We had the go-ahead for remote access using citrix - which was planned for all users. It was so expensive at the time tho' that we shelved it.

Wouldn't remotely accessible file areas like is available with exchange fulifil those needs [of all users] anyway?

[nuttygeek]

You might be interested to know that in schools terminal services is free to setup and run as we have it running here and when we spoke to microsoft then if your running server 2003 and its for education then its free the is a grey line around it to what your allowed to do with it but we have been running it with great success for about 5 months now and it has all the security of windows and is pretty easy to setup with a little reading on the microsoft server 2003 website. Terminal services will also do everthing you have put in you list as we also run SIMS and it works fine through the remote connection (2mb line) the only thing with it is if you have alot of people accessing the server remotely it will use up alot of resources so are sever is happy with 4GB of ram hope this is some help
Nuttygeek

[andy]

interesting...

[Geoff]

We in Lancashire are investigating reverse proxying

Actually CLEO are already trialling it with a couple of schools. Carr Hill has its Moodle VLE reverse proxied out to the entire universe.

Then there's the VPN trial. Handy for us techies but there's far too many technical hurdles to expect a teacher to cope with it. Terminal services goes some way to mitigate that though I suppose.