Remote Access network share

Question

I am trying to create a share for a company, and I have given ownCloud a try.

After installing and trying to configure it in a few computers for a test drive, I am starting to feel that this is not the right solution, and I would like to know if there are any viable alternatives, or if I am approaching this the wrong way.

owncloud offers fantastic features such as syncing and an application to perform this sync operations with the server, but this, in my opinion, only makes sense up to a certain share dimension.

In this specific case, the share size surpasses 250GB, and needs to be installed in dozens of computers. This would require each and every computer to have at least 250GB of spare hard disk space, as well as space for future additions.

Because of that, I don't feel that ownCloud is the perfect solution for this scenario. I would rather have a remote access share, something that can easily be mapped as a network drive in windows.

This would add extra latency when accessing files, with the benefit of not relying on the existance of disk space to be able to navigate through the share.

I would prefer something open source and linux based, similar to ownCloud, but with a different set of features and with a different purpose.

Update:

I have mounted an owncloud share as a network drive using ssl, and it does not work well. when I try to open files, windows asks me for credentials every time (for office files such as docx and xlsx) and shows me permission denied on pdfs, compressed files and others.

I would needs this to be accessible through the internet, not only intranet, and have access control, in a similar way to ownCloud, with each user or group being able to access specific shares.

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TL;DR: a software that…

• runs on a CentOS server with cPanel
• makes disk space available which…
• must be easily mountable on Windows machines
• additionally needs some web interface to access files when a mount can not be done
• must have a fine grained access control

Ideally something php based that can be installed inside a cpanel account would be great, but this could also be created and managed manually, if no other solution exists. I was aiming for something self managed, self hosted, without license costs, such as ownCloud.

Any hints?

Answer 1

If you might prefer to purchase a solution as opposed to rolling your own, efolder's Anchor product could be a viable option.

http://www.efolder.net/products/anchor/ http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/efolder-anchor-review,2-833.html

Answer 2

I actually have been using ownCloud for several months and it fits my requirements so far, even though I have found some limitations.

I have been able to install it successfully into cPanel servers inside user accounts, it has super fine grained permission control which allows me to create groups and add permissions to folders for those groups, manage users within groups, and a lot more.

One of the problems I have found recently is integration with other software. I have antivirus software running on the servers that sometimes quarantines files within ownCloud shares. After a file has been removed, if I try adding owncloud desktop sync client to a new machine, it fails to sync when it tries to sync a file that is no longer present in the folder it was supposed to be in. I find that to be a problem, in my opinion the file should be skipped, and the sync process should go on with the remaining files, even if it shows a warning or something similar saying that some files were not synced.

Nonetheless, a very good solution for my requirements.