Setting Up VPN

[Colonel Bill]

Gents,

OK, I'll admit right off I'm an idiot, because I should know this. However I'm throwing in the towel and pleading for your help.

I have an HP TP running Tenderloin and I am trying to set up a VPN connection to my college so that I can work on material while on the road. I am using the Entree Pro Cisco AnyConnect compatible VPN client and it does seem to make the connection without any problem.

At that point I am stumped. If I was on a Windows machine I would simply go to START > RUN > NAME OF SERVER, then see the file tree pop up in Windows Explorer.

How does one do the same thing in Android??? I have seen where the solution might be in the settings of various file managers such as Astro or ES, but I am unsure exactly which ones to use. Can someone please gently walk me through that process?

Regards, Colonel Bill

 

[epidenimus]

Perhaps a better place to start is asking how you might access your files with the tablet while you are on campus. VPN only adds another layer of variables, but should allow you to access things as if you were on your campus domain when it is working properly. You may have to enter the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), such as server.domainname.edu

It sounds like your campus network is Windoze based (lame!). Windoze uses a sharing protocol called SMB or Samba. You should be able to access any server/share to which you have access rights, but you may need to install a plugin in some app cases. For instance, I use Ghost Commander as a file manager, but I need to have their SMB plugin installed to interact with some shares on my work domain. Other file managers may not be capable of this task.

I use the Cisco Rooted Any Connect app to get in and it works fine on my device, even if it likes to open up on its own in the background.

 

[Colonel Bill]

Thanks for the response, much appreciated. I'm familiar with SAMBA, but always thought the server had to have the software for the connection to be made. Was I incorrect?

Second, let's assume I have the Samba plugin installed, and say I am using ES File Explorer. Under which category would I insert the VPN parameters? ES lists Local, LAN, FTP, Bluetooth and Net.

 

[epidenimus]

If your university network is indeed Windows based, the only sharing protocol that Windoze uses and recognizes is Samba; SMB is Windoze filesharing. Getting it to do standards like NFS is where it gets tricky or impossible.

I am not terribly familiar with ES File Explorer, personally, and cannot attest to its capabilities. Perhaps you just phrased it poorly, it sounds like you may still not be sure what VPN does. If you are trying to access a share on the remote VPN'd domain, then you would enter the FQDN in the appropriate app (e.g. http://server.domainname.edu/webpagefile in a browser, server.domainname.edu in an FTP client with your username and password in the appropriate fields). Think of the VPN like a hosts file entry that says "For things in this domain, go here..."