Networking

I'm trying to set up a network between me and somebody who lives quite a distance away from me. I want a "harddrive" that we "share" so that whenever one person accesses it, they recieve all update that the other person may have added.

IN OTHER WORDS:
I'm trying to work with somebody a long way away from me on a game. We must be able to share the same files on our computers (a big "GAME PROJECT" folder), so that when one person accesses and saves a file, the person on the other line may access the new files instantly.

How can this be done?? Is there a web service, or some equipment I need to purchase to do so??
Any help is appreciated, thanks!

sounds like a job for a cvs server...

I wouldn't know how to set one up though, as I've never done it myself, but I'm sure there are some clever guys here who've done it.. :)

Now that I think of it, I'm kind of interrrested in the subject as well, incase I ever do some online team work..

Get OpenVPN for your systems and use it to create a VPN Tunnel between the machines. With a lot of tweaking, you will be able to use a fileserver through that VPN tunnel.

And, no, this is NOT trivial, but you will get much farther with OpenVPN than with the (mostly broken) stuff that Microsoft ships with its systems. We were not able to get a working --ENCRYPTED(!!)-- VPN tunnel between two of our offices using Windows Server 2003, but we managed to do so with OpenVPN on FreeBSD. Unencrypted connections are easy with Windows, but unfortunately they are also very useless from a security perspective.

You should also allocate three to five full work days for the setup when you have never done something like that before. The OpenVPN documentation is not as accurate as it should be, to use polite terms.

Going for a hosted CVS or SVN server might be a better solution for you.

or you could simply setup an ftp server on one of the machines. pretty easy todo and quite abit of freeware todo it.

www.snapfiles.com is a good palce to find stuff like this.

Here are some quick links (I haven't digested them entirely but maybe you'd be interested).
Info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoise_svn
http://www.subversionary.org

Take these links for their general ideas (not specific endorsements in any way).
Hosting:
http://cvsdude.com/product.pl
https://opensvn.csie.org
http://www.assembla.com
http://www.berlios.de

Hamachi is probably ideal...

http://www.hamachi.cc/download/list.php

You can use Windows Live Messenger to share files and updates.

http://get.live.com/messenger/overview

I used netdrive.exe (A tool from novell)
It can map FPT sites to an local drive.

Example
X: is mapped to ftp://server.voidrpg.com

Thoe netdrive.exe is old tool and will not work in vista :/

ssh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh

I use it for port forwarding vnc & ftp sometimes.
It should work for forwarding smb(windows) network port too.. not tried this myself tho.

Also, to use any of it (vnc,ssh etc.) you need to resolve your non static IP address for something permanent. You can do this for free here: http://www.dyndns.org

You can set up your router to update it with its current IP address (be sure to use a unique password for dyndns.org, NOT the same one you use to log in to ssh or vnc! as the routers ip update broadcast to dyndns is un-encrypted).

Does it support routing and broadcasting and all the other protocols through a VPN tunnel? Using the SMB protocol through VPN is a bit of a problem.