OpenVPN connected... Now what? (How to access a drive)

[Paddy Landau]

I want my wife to be able to use her laptop to access a specific directory (say, /home/paddy/ourdata) on my machine, even when she's travelling.

I installed OpenVPN and followed the instructions -- successfully. My wife's machine successfully pings my machine.

But... now what?

How do I get my wife's machine to see my directory /home/paddy/ourdata?

My machine: Ubuntu Hardy 8.04
My wife's machine: Ubuntu Jaunty Remix 9.04

[cariboo]

If your wife can connect to your computer, then she should be able to use sftp to access files from nautilus. If she is running windows, give winscp a try.

[Paddy Landau]

If your wife can connect to your computer, then she should be able to use sftp to access files from nautilus. If she is running windows, give winscp a try.

Thanks for the idea. Both computers are Ubuntu (see first post).

I should have explained myself more clearly; I'd like her machine to access my directory as a directory. That way, her program will access the data rather than having to transfer files using FTP.

Looking for answers, I think that NFS may be the solution. I will try it tomorrow, unless you have any easier or better ideas.

[Paddy Landau]

Well, I've tried NFS but without success.

Here's what I did on my machine:

• Created a directory /srv/access and gave read-write permission to all.
• Added a line to /etc/exports: "/srv/access *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)".
• Started NFS: "sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start".

Here's what I did on my wife's machine:

• ping 10.8.0.1 (to double-check that I have OpenVPN access). It succeeded.
• Created a directory /mnt/access on her machine and gave read-write access to all.
• Tried to mount my directory on her machine. It gave the error message, "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on 10.8.0.1:/srv/access, missing codepage or helper program, or other error". I've tried the following commands:
  
  • mount 10.8.0.1:/srv/access /mnt/access
  • mount -t nfs 10.8.0.1:/srv/access /mnt/access
  
  

Now I'm stumped.

Can anyone help me here? Perhaps I have the wrong end of the stick, or perhaps there's a much easier way?

[WakkiTabakki]

Just checking... Is nfs-client installed on the wifes computer?

/N

[Paddy Landau]

Just checking... Is nfs-client installed on the wifes computer?

Good question!

I've just installed nfs-common from Synaptic...

... And it works! (At least on my network. Now I have to take the machine to a Starbucks or whatever and test it there.)

Thanks very much.