Topic: To be a killer product

[Gerald]

e-smith as it stands is the best product I know of for small and medium sized businesses. However, for it to be a truly "killer" product it should have a VNC capability that will allow "pcanywhere" (VNC) like capabilites that tunnel through the firewall to take over workstations. This is necessary to allow remote execution of day to day applications like Quickbooks and Peachtree accounting. Even with cable modems and DSL it it not practical to upload and download files to run these programs. It wouldn't serve the purpose any way in a multi-user mode. It would allow a poor man"s mini ASP capability that would truely allow distributed processing.

[Sung H. Suh]

I believe you can setup port forwarding rules in ipfwadm (once installed) to allow a VNC client to connect to your various workstations behind the e-smith gateway. A simpler way would probably be for you to use PPTP or IPSec to create a VPN between  your e-smith server (samba file server) and your remote computer so that you can access your accounting files in true multi-user mode.

With the recent and ongoing popularity of VPNs, I can guess that we'll see some support for them in later releases of e-smith.  I believe LRP (Linux Router Project) allows for IPSec, so as long as you're willing to make some modifications to your existing installation, you should be able to setup a VPN right now.


Sung H. Suh
ssuh@mobility.wox.org