FMP Server 5.5 Remote Access Help Needed

[danabase]

I have a school that is upgrading there current FileMaker 5.5 system to 8. In the meantime, they want to have remote access to the 5.5 system until the new server with remote access is put in place.

I installed FMP Server Config 5.5 on their OS 10.2.8 Server. We are able to see the files on campus, but cannot see them off campus. They do not have any firewall blocking this (they think), and the firewall hardware people say that port 80 is open by default.

Is there an old thread about setting this up, or are there certain things I can look for to see if their settings are correct?

I am assuming that FMP server uses a TCP port, and that I can turn on the Directory service in the settings to the computers IP address, but this does not seem to work.

Any ideas or documentation out there?

THANKS!!

[IdealData]

By "remote" access I presume you are connecting via dialup or DSL. There seems to be some confusion between web access and FMP hosting here.

Firstly FMP Server does not affer any WEB based services (like IWP or CWP), so you must be trying to connect using FMP client on the remote machine.

Method 1 - Extend the network

Set up a VPN service so that the network becomes "extended" to the remote user and then they can connect using "local host"

Method 2 - Punch a hole through the firewall

The firewall/router at the campus perimeter must be configured to provide ADDRESS/PORT forwarding to the FMP Server. Users would then try to connect to the public IP Address in the hosts dialog box, amd the traffic is automatically routed to the internal machine.

Please note that FMP uses port 5003 to carry its own proprietary networking protocol.

[IdealData]

I forgot to mention that the performance is pretty poor under remote connection due to the high volume of traffic that FM Server sends to the clients, and is barely usable with 256K upstream connections. If you have more then it might be practical, but users will need to be patient.

[danabase]

Thanks for the info!

Sorry for the confusion, I was not talking about web access, I was referring to remote access via either VPN or dsl from the outside.

It sounds like VPN is less complicated than the alternative. Is there a known VPN application that works well on an OS X server (10.2.8)? I do know one school that uses VPN to access their FileMaker databases, but that is on windows machines.