Home / server / Questions / 18887
Accepted
yukondude
Asked: 2009-06-04 08:04:39 +0800 CST

What's a reasonably secure web-based storage system, that ideally can be mounted as a virtual filesystem on Windows?

  • 772

Our small community college assigns each of our approximately 1000 students a personal My Documents folder that is an alias for a Windows server share (also mapped as their P: drive). Students access this from their computer lab accounts. For security reasons, this share is not accessible from our wireless network segment, nor from the public Internet.

Naturally, students would like to access their college files from their laptops and from home. Can anyone recommend a reasonably secure web-based storage system (open source or commercial) that could serve their shares from the Windows file server (Active Directory-managed accounts)?

To make it as simple to use as possible, an ideal system would feature a client that could mount the connection to the web-based storage as a virtual filesystem. A lightweight or Flash client to support drag 'n drop and multiple-file up/download would be an acceptable alternative. Do either of these exist?

I especially welcome comments from anyone who's tried this, especially for a large, transient group of users that have wildly varying levels of computer literacy.

filesystems storage web-applications

6 Answers

  1. I work at a mid sized University, and we also have MyStorage folders for our 30k users. We're using WebDAV. We know it is a dying protocol. That said we haven't found anything else that replicates its functionality as easily or cheaply. It does require IIS and another download from Microsoft. Here is some documentation that might get you pointed in the right direction. Installing and Configuring Webdav on IIS 7.0

    • 6
  2. Best Answer

    It seems to me that a better solution would be to set up a VPN to handle the security side of things, then students would have all the access they are used to (if you want them to) in the way they are used to getting it. and it's simple to use from the end-user's point of view.

    • 2

  3. MS Sharepoint would probably be a good solution and would easily integrate with your existing AD server. It is secure, but not cheap. It does allow you to access the share either via HTTP/S or mapping it to a drive letter(I believe this function uses WebDAV as David posted).

    http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pages/Default.aspx

    • 1

  4. Since you are planning long term to go VPN, I assume you'd like this to be cheap?

    As a thought, you could use basic IIS, using SSL and just put the users folder on the internet and allow directory browsing? The IIS would check the permissions and only allow access to the files based on AD file permissions that are already there (think no more configuration then you do now) Since you us SSL with it, its atleast secure.

    The big downside, is its one way only, to the students could read/download the files, but then when they change them they cannot put them back on the network until they plug back in.

    • 1

  5. try www.alfresco.com, it will cost something (you can add AD with additiona US 500), but this is something we are doing now for large number of users

    • 1

  6. WebDAV springs to mind. Not sure how you'd implement that on Windows. I suspect IIS is involved somewhere.

    • 0