Quote:
Originally Posted by encorp  Another thing just came up. My GF is going to Vancouver for school while I'm staying Toronto for now, for work. Would any of these ideas work to allow her and I to send files back and forth reliably? Or allow her to connect and access files on my computer safely? |
Yes. Many VPN solutions would solve that problem. Everyone should be behind at least a residential gateway with stateful NAT and inbound connection dropping. If your GF will be living in a dorm this may not be possible but if she is renting and has DSL or Cable then you should buy a WRT54GL (or whatever brand you like) and rig it up with DDwrt. You could preconfigure it with DynDNS, pre-shared keys, and anything else necessary for easy use. Doubly so if she is not very interested in the wire head stuff.
There are a couple options for connections. Do you want to be always connected or just when you/she wants? The latter is probably easier to configure but you have to mess with connections every time you want to use it.
If you decide to go with a PC based gateway/firewall/VPN server on your end then it would probably be best to make her gateway a client for your VPN. Alternately she could run client software on her host to connect to your VPN.
You probably want to investigate some web alternatives for backup. Hamachi and GoToMyPC both offer free services. Personally, I will never give some faceless US company the keys to my castle but I understand the services do work well and you might need them if things really go bad.
If you just want to do secure file transfer then a purely client based solution like WASTE might be the easiest way. Even SFTP is pretty easy to set up for simple use. Most IM services already offer a secure message transfer. Even Skype offers an encrypted setting; it does not work very well, but it keeps the average Joe out of your conversation.