VPN and remote linux share on windows

Question

In order to ease the development process, I need to do somehow so i would be able to browse my remote linux server hard drive like a common windows drive or a network share. I tried WebDrive and it's analogues, but they are slow, buggy and the best thing they can do is to hang the system for a couple of hours :(

So i searched another solution, and i've read a lot of comments where people were telling that the best option is to create a share through a VPN.

Can someone to enumerate me all the steps that i should perform, in order to do this? Please take into account, that i barely understand what is VPN and how it works.

Answer 1

The easy way to do that is to use OpenVPN. It's well documented, stock on linux, and available on windows.

A VPN is kind of like a tesseract. it "folds" a network so that two systems appear next to each other on the network.

Lets say you have a Windows Box A, that connects to router 1, which connects to the internet, which connects to router 2, which connects to Linux server B. A VPN creates a tunnel so that Box A and Box B are in the same subnet.

[Box A] <-> [Router 1] <-> {Internet} <-> [Router 2] <-> [Box B]
            Through magical VPN folding becomes:
[Box A] <----------------------------------------------> [Box B]

I would suggest reading http://wiki.imagestream.com/wiki/OpenVPN as a starting point. It covers setting up Windows as a client and in peer to peer mode as well as having instructions for generic linux in peer to peer mode. If you know how to setup Samba, then it should be trivial to add your VPN subnet to the allowed networks.