[dagw]

It will do everything that Dropbox does

Only after a whole lot of hacking and you'll probably end up having to slap a real server in front of your NAS.

[vetinari]

What would the real server run?

I haven't found anything, that Dropbox does that the NAS doesn't. Maybe there is some marginal function, I don't know. But is that hypothetical marginal function worth the 900% price premium (per year) plus reduced privacy?

[dagw]

How do you do offline syncing and sharing of folders with people outside of your network? Having to manage a bunch of VPN accounts for outside users seems like a major pain and getting them all set up with OpenVPN seems like an even bigger pain.

[vetinari]

We are using IPSEC VPN for external access. It works with standard clients in Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, iOS, whatever.

It allows not only access to files on NAS, but also to webapps on another box and remote desktop on yet another box.

Though I'm thinking about how to configure haproxy to allow Remote Desktop Gateway and https on the single IP, that we have.

[dagw]

Having to manage VPN accounts for everybody I want to share a folder with sounds like a huge pain. Especially if I have to go ask the VPN admin each time. And I'm still curious how you do offline access and syncing to local disk.

[vetinari]

There is no offline access or syncing.

The data is available over gigabit link. It is local, after all. No need to sync to hide the latency.

And after all, there is more data on NAS, that the drive on my notebook can handle. No need to have it all locally.

[dagw]

So you're not actually doing everything (or even most things) that Dropbox does. I mean we also have a file server with a several TB of disk and gigabit links and VPN and all that jazz at the office, but that is in no way a replacement for what Dropbox offers.

[moey]

On windows, one can use this:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/working-with-netw...