VPN and Drive Mapping

[martinmorg31]

Hi All

I have just been told by our external contractor that a site to site VPN should not be used to map network drives. To say my jaw dropped is an understatement. Sop my fellow edugeekers, can you confirm/deny what has been suggested here?

 

To give you the full story...we have a vpn link with a separate school as part of our federation of schools. When staff visit this external site they wish to login and access their drives as if they were on the main campus. This has been working before a new broadband/firewall upgrade was setup by said contractors but due to the 2nd year of poor connectivity and regular dropouts they are now telling us it 'is not designed to support mapped drives'.

 

Discuss.

[strawberry]

Ask them what design they suggest to support mapped drives.

[sparkeh]

Sounds like excuses to me. If the link is working correctly there's no reason not to use mapped drives.

[Oaktech]

To sidestep the issue altogether, could you get an RDS server up?

[martinmorg31]

We have rds setup to serve the main campus and the satellite site, but with the dodgy vpn connection that doesn't support the satellite site any more. So we are having to build a couple more servers so staff can rdweb into the satellite site.

[cpjitservices]

We have this in place with our cloud desktop solution, though you VPN in first then RDP into the server running RDS.

 

Drive mapping works perfect as does passing through printers etc. I dont see why mapping networks drives over VPn would be an issue?

[sted]

not done it a lot but set up direct access once and it mapped drives/printers quite happily to the point i was installing sophos off a \\ address to a laptop miles away from the main network. bar the speed difference you would of been hard pushed to know you were remote

[Marci]

Change external contractors.

[MatthewL]

WTF!!

 

I have used mapped drives on site to site links of varying speed from 2Mb with 40 users on to 500Mb connections all with no issues for years. Yes when connections are slow it does take a while to open and close but most have over 10Mb these days.

 

What planet is your contractor on?