I am not even sure this can be done the way I need it to work.
First. We have a CLOUD drive full of documents. a LOT of them.
Second We have a website (actually several) where some of these documents are posted for "subscribers" to view. They have to have a username/password to get into the site their site.
Third. Currently, the procedure has been to get the documents (pdf's usually) from the server that holds them and upload them to the website server in the folder they need to be in.
This has worked perfect now for 2 years. The problem is that recent changes in the access provided by many ISP's has made it impossible for many of the employees to "work from home".
I am not smart enough to explain WHY or HOW the ISP's do it. I do know that it involves blocking port 445 to the Home Internet Users. And in such a way that having a VPN does no good.
I have had several people tell me that this can't be done but I can prove that it is 100% possible and actually results in the Users not having access (via mapped drive anyway) to the Office servers when the users are on their home Internet. hey can connect a VPN with no problem and until recently that VPN WOULD allow mapping of a network drive.
But however they do it, it is the result of some kind of block on port 445 that cannot be bypassed using a VPN.
I CAN create a "network Place" and I am looking at a way to use that. In the meantime, we went to CLOUD storage which works , sort of, but VERY SLOW because they might need to upload 30 files at a time in an hour or less. Some may be large files. I have clocked the actual download time from the cloud at 775kbps TOPS. Once they get the file they have to Upload it to the Website server. And where that once was almost instantaneous it is now horribly slow. All of the employees are still trying to upload stuff to the webserver that is actually still in the Queue from the CLOUD drive to even get to their system. They think it is already there just because they can see the name. No one looks at the files size to notice it is "0" and growing by the minute. so they try to upload a file that is currently still downloading. 30 of them all at once. Just won't happen
Anyway. It occurred to me that there might be a much more efficient solution if I knew how to make it work.
The employees would post a LINK to the file which resides on the CLOUD drive instead of uploading a full copy of the actual file itself.
IF there is a way to do this.
I am sure there are probably a 100 other issues I have not considered but if this could be done it would sure make things faster and easier. Upload the documents only once to the Cloud Servers.
Then post a LINK to each one as needed in a folder on another website. Visitors who had access would click the link to view the file which is actually what they do now. Only at this time, the file they click on resides on the webserver itself, not a remote cloud drive. So they click on a pdf that is located on in a CACHE folder on the webserver. I need to use a LINK to a location on another CLOUD drive IF that can be done.
And for security sake, it would need to be a non-retraceable link. In other words, the people viewing it would not know it was a link back to another Source.
There are probably many other ways to accomplish this, one of which is to copy the entire 15GB of documents onto each employees laptops and keep it synced to the CLOUD drive.
the issues only arise when they are loading the websites. The ones who use the SLOW CLOUD access to get the files into the database to start with are fine as they may have 1 fle every 10 minutes or so to upload.
It is the ones who try to download 30 and then upload them to the webservers at the same time. They were used to the speed of a direct mapped drive which was a LOT faster.
OK Long post. Any ideas appreciated. This is probably something done everyday by people who know how. I just don't know HOW?