Networking XServes Question...

[lostmind]

Question...I have an Xserve....Our parent company has an Xserve. They want us to be able to access their Xserve and vice-versa so we can work on their files in case we get slow. Is something like pcAnywhere the only solution or is there a more proper way to set this up?? We tried connecting Windows platforms, but both companies don't have compatible firewalls so it wasn't going to work so I'm not sure if this is going to be the same issue... Thanks!

[PantherMac]

Since nobody else has touched you....

That's a complicated question to answer properly, and based on what I've read so-far, no offense meant, but you'd be far better off hiring someone to handle this for you. I suspect there are WAN issue's involved, among others. Perhaps there's an IT group at the parent company that might be able to shed some light (I've no idea what infrastructure issue's are involved)?
Technically, what you're proposing is possible, but w/o knowing a lot of other information, impossible to give you direction. Might be best just to try an FTP site or some kind of other large-file-transfer system, rather than migrating files across large distances.

- Mac

[neotrog]

I'd say that firewalls are never incompatible, but their rules might be. The Apple File Protocol is plenty internet routeable. I've been doing it for more years than I care to remember. My key customers log in from wherever via "Connet to Server...", with the url "afp://123.123.123.1". (IP address faked). Typically when it doesn't work it's just because They are using a NAT firewall with out One-to-One NAT mapping or because they simply aren't allowing outgoing traffic on port 548. If these terms mean nothing to you, you might throw them at your firewall administrator and if he/she doesn't understand it throw a rock at them. Some ISP's like Frontier actually block all port 135-139 traffic which will mean you can't use the windows SMB protocol like "smb://123.123.123.1" even though all your gear is right.

• Make sure you have a firewall rule to allow port 548 to the IP address of your server only from the subnet of your other facilty and it'll be pretty safe.

• Make sure each server either has real routeable IP address or has some kind of mapping that will get requests to port 548 of a particular IP address to that server.