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« on: December 10, 2010, 07:45 PM »
I am no network expert, but I really think you are ignoring a lot of the reasons WHY the disconnections occur. Moreover, you are not considering the difficulty in even setting up a basic connection, let alone what you are looking for. FTP as a protocol, from my understanding, is a point to point connection for a file or files. You define what you want sent and it sends it. It builds the header file, sends the data, and reconstructs it on the other end. Once that is done the session is closed. If it doesn't close, the other end doesn't know the transmission is complete and it never rebuilds the bits in the correct order. (Maybe someone else can explain it better/correctly).
Other protocols, such as HTTP will appear to keep the connection open, but in reality just burst data in a similar manner. The problem here is latency and data control. Data can not handle disruption of the data stream without corruption. Even on a LAN this can be an issue. This becomes even more severe when you go from system to system and perhaps (even probably) from system structure to system structure. Sure the protocol is the same, but system requirements make implementation(s) different and therefore, potentially, less than perfectly compatible.
Then you have multiple networks to deal with, any one of which can break (or be broken) at any time outside of your control. I work as a Network Monitor (among other duties) for my company and it is a rare day when we don't have some sort of WAN outage, not to mention the numerous LAN outages somewhere in our network. That is why there is so much redundancy built in, and to build that in costs a LOT of money.
So what does this all have to do with your request? Well first off, it means ANY solution that fits what you want is very likely going to be rather complicated to set up. Moreover, how much control do you need/want and how much would you want/need for the other users? From my initial readings I would say VPN is likely the way for you to go, but perhaps something like HTTP using a web sharing interface (like SkyDrive, et. al.) would work better? Does it have to integrate directly into your file manager? You seem to imply it should. If so, then the VPN is again the way to go (or something REALLY crazy like VDI, but that is way over the top just to integrate file sharing...). Perhaps just having a drive letter assigned to a file would work with something like DropBox? Don't know if you can do that, but there are some services out there you can (or at least could - I used to have one but can't remember the service anymore - I think it was SkyDrive before they got bought by Microsoft, but I could be way off base). Even if that works, though, it still would not have an always on connection like a LAN drive. If you are not fond of even that kind of speed and insist that it should be instant, like a local folder, well then I give up. I can't even imagine any system capable of that across the internet without dedicated off-line wires going to each computer in the network. Again, I am no expert, and I may have a lot of this slightly (or not so slightly) wrong, but I am sure others can correct this. Never the less, I can say the options I presented are as close as I can come to a suggestion and why I think you are over-simplifying your request.