Vault's remote access possibilities

[GazzaJ]

I am considering purchasing Vault but need to confirm I can use it given the set up of my company’s network (or rather lack of it). We are a small company with developers in many locations and do not have a centralised network or office, but we need to have some source code control application in place.

Say Office A has a router connected to the Internet with a static IP address and machines within the network are given private IP addresses by the router. I could set up a Vault database on a machine on this network and open a HTTP port on the router which forwards traffic to the router’s IP address and port number to the machine with the Vault database on it.

Is it then possible to use the Vault client from other locations via the Internet to access the Vault database in the manner http://MyRouterIPaddress:80/VaultServer

Can anyone advise if this is possible or if any options are available given our computing infrastructure?

[Don Thimsen]

Vault works great for remote developers. This was one of the primary reasons that our company switched. The performance for remote users is excellent.

One thing you might consider would be the use of VPN. If neccessary, upgrade your router at the main office to something that supports VPN tunnels. Good ones are relativiely inexcpensive these days ($200-400), and then you don't needlessly expose assests to the internet. Our company uses Zywall routers from ZyXEL. They also have a software client for remote users, but over time we ended up putting the low-end Zywalls at each "fixed" remote node.

HTH,
Don

PS. We came off Microsoft VSS. VSS+VPN was unusable.

[dan]

As Don says, Vault was specifically designed to work easily over the internet.

I see no problems with Vault handling your configuration. But, you can always install it and verify that it works before buying if you have concerns.

[GazzaJ]

Thanks for the posts. I have downloaded the demo version and set it up on my machine. From my machine everything works fine, I connect using the Vault client, using the name of my machine and I can also connect to the underlying SQL Server using the server name MYMACHINENAME\Vault. From a web broswer everything works fine e.g. I followed the KB article http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?p=2450 and all the commands work fine when I use my machine name or local IP address but when I try to access them using the IP address of my router I get the following message:

"Unable to connect to http://MY_PUBLIC_IP_ADDRESS/VaultService. No server was found at the specified URL. Please verify your network settings using the Options dialog under the Tools menu in the Vault GUI Client. Web Exception: The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found."

E.g.
http://MY_MACHINE_NAME/VaultService/VaultService.asmx = Ok
http://MY_LOCAL_IP_ADDRESS/VaultService/VaultService.asmx = Ok
http://MY_PUBLIC_IP_ADDRESS/VaultService/VaultService.asmx = Fail

Are there any KB aricles on remote access or is this an IIS issue or something else?

[gmagana]

Are you sure your firewall settings are configured correctly? If you cannot access Vault through your public IP, then there are a host of possibilities as to the cause.

If you are absolutely sure that you have no firewall/routing problems, then you should look at the Vault config, otherwise just focus on setting up your firewalling correctly before you even look at the Vault config.

[jeremy_sg]

One issue that I ran into with a customer recently was that his gateway (an ISA server, in this case) was set up to not allow .asmx extension files. Can you successfully connect to the Vault web server when you load http://MY_PUBLIC_IP_ADDRESS/VaultService/VaultService.asmx in a web browser?