Ok, I've searched around quite a bit and can't find a concise answer. I've recently acquired a HP Proliant Microserver, and have installed FreeNAS 7 on it. At the moment I have a CIFS/SMB service running which I'm using to share my Itunes folder on one of the drives over the LAN. On my computer I have it added as a network drive and point Itunes to it which works great. What I would like to do is access it in the same way at work, that way I can see album artwork playcount and everything and it will update the Itunes xml file as well. This is my first endeavour into networking and running a server so everything is very new to me, any help would great. Thanks, Will.
Do not do this. You would have to open the ports for cifs/smb through your routers firewall leaving your server well open to attack from the baddies that are on the internet. cifs/smb isn't designed to be accessed over the internet. Far too dangerous mate. Thinking about it I'm not sure it would even be possible. Things like ftp/sftp are the way to access your nas over the internet.
Ok, I wasn't thinking of using CIFS to do this but good to know it's not a good idea anyway. So how would I go about doing this using SSH or SFTP?
I cant remember all off the top of my head but but CIFS and Port forwarding is way forward that you looking for there was some posts on the Freenas forum about doing this have you looked there ??
If all you are concerned with is listening to music, squeezebox or firefly modules for freenas might be a solution.
The easiest way to do it is just get an expensive router that lets you VPN home. I have a draytek 2830n, It supports VPN tunnelling. You can probably get a cheaper router that does it as these are about £200, but I managed to get one cheaper through work. Im not on a static IP, and I havent yet had to change my vpn ip address so if your worried about being on a dynamic IP, its not really an issue, your IP might change if you keep rebooting your router. A note about the 2830n, it has the best wireless strengh of any router I have ever had - which is good as draytek's used to be **** for wireless!