dfs – Storage Made Easy Blog

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

How to securely web enable access to CIFS / SMB File Shares

One of the predominant use cases that many companies have is to enable file access to SMB file shares that live behind the corporate firewall , or indeed are hosted on IaaS infrastructures (such as Amazon FSX or Azure Files), without the need for a VPN and without reconfiguring permissions whilst using Active Directory or LDAP for authentication and also ensuring that data is secure and compliance legislation is satisfied.

This has of course become even more of a requisite during the recent Covid-19 pandemic in which there is a pressing need to enabled. such access for remote workers.

Accessing files over CIFS/SMB network over VPN using a mobile network is possible but access can be patchy, clients apps limited and it is often extremely slow.

The File Fabric enables this using its built in CIFS / SMB connector. This blog post will step through how to web enable SMB file shares.

Continue reading “How to securely web enable access to CIFS / SMB File Shares”

March 23, 2020April 23, 2021

Securely working with multi-cloud data in Microsoft Teams using the File Fabric

This is a follow on from our similar blog post on integrating Slack with the File Fabric.

Microsoft Teams is an alternative to Slack that has gained a lot of traction particularly in the last couple of week because of the need for employees to work from home. We have had several requests of how the File Fabric can be used within Teams and this post outlines how this can be achieved.

Continue reading “Securely working with multi-cloud data in Microsoft Teams using the File Fabric”

August 19, 2016June 19, 2020

Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 2

In part 1, we set up the SME appliance with a Microsoft DFS Storage Provider. Today we will continue the setup, enabling AD user authentication, corporate shares, department shares, and home directories for each user.

Prerequisites

This article assumes you followed along in Part 1 and met the prerequisites there, in addition you’ll need a few more shares configured on your fileserver, and a few users and groups configured in Active Directory.

Continue reading “Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 2”

August 9, 2016June 19, 2020

Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 1

Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browserThis blog post will highlight how a company can leverage their existing Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) infrastructure as a part of their cloud strategy. Companies will be able to treat DFS shares as cloud storage and automatically create cloud DFS shares for users based on their DFS home directory.

Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) is a technology that allows multiple servers to host a single file share, providing fault tolerance and performance enhancement for multi-site Active Directory topologies.

Microsoft introduced DFS as an add-on to Windows NT 4.0, and DFS has been included in all versions of Windows since Windows 2000. DFS consists of a server component, included in all versions of Windows Server, and a client component, included in all versions of Windows. It works with the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (sometimes referred to as Windows networking). The SMB protocol is also more commonly known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS). Continue reading “Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 1”