Remote Access to Students Home Drive

[hdevine643]

Hello,

Our School runs its own network with Server 2008 R2 servers hosting Students home directories and other network drives.
We also have TMG configured as a proxy server.

We have been looking into VLE solutions for the school but after requirements gathering it seems that the greatest requirement is for Students and Staff to be able to access their 'Home Drives' external to the School.

Can someone please advise on the best & most secure solution for this.

[rush_tech]

You could try HAP+ Home Access Plus+

*EDIT* welcome to Edugeek

[hdevine643]

How Secure is HAP+

[jamesfed]

Runs over HTTPS so is as secure as you need - uses the same login username/password as you use for AD and works with TMG (we have it here as well).
You can setup TMG to also perform in transit AV scanning of anything your students are up/downloading.

[hdevine643]

Sound Good. Any documentation on TMG side of things? How do your Students / Staff rate the HAP+ experience????

[jamesfed]

Just publish it as you would any other site in TMG - the HAP software its self is a IIS website and there are plenty of details on the HAP+ codeplex page as to how to set it up.

[jamesfed]

Staff use our VPN so they never come accross it.
For the students they love it - so simple and quick (runs on praticly anything phones included as well!) just need to make sure they are educated in how to use it so make sure you get your IT Teachers onboard!

[cyr0n_k0r]

We have our students use our VPN as well.
We run the Cisco VPN client and have an ASA. We use IPSec so there was not any additional licensing.
We have not had any problems with students and they enjoy being able to work on files on their shared drive while at home.

[Davit2005]

Considering HAP as alternative to VPN for simplicity, staff/student end users do not need access to on site SIMS, databases or anything like that so don't really need VPN.

Does HAP require the actual users home area to be shared, i.e. \\servername\[studentname$] or will it work with \\servername\[students areas]\studentname

Thanks in anticipation of reply.

[nickbro]

Hi @Davit2005, it doesn't. You configure it with 'drives' as you would in Windows. You don't have to set a user home area

[Davit2005]

Hi @Davit2005, it doesn't. You configure it with 'drives' as you would in Windows. You don't have to set a user home area

Sorted, Looks like another project to get me teeth into ;D .

[Sylv3r]

We found a terminal server was more useful than just giving access to a user home area.

Obvioussly costs a lot more than the above methods mentioned.

[hdevine643]

Hello, I am working through v7 Documentation for setup on IIS7.
On step 34. I get an error msg as in the attachment 'Mime Error'

Also when I try browsing to the application / website I get the an error as in attachment 'Application Errror'

Please help.

[nickbro]

Complete the task that the error message is telling you about, delete line 118 from the web.config file

[hdevine643]

I have deleted the line and now get a Server Error regarding ASP ????Server Error.jpg