[EnVoy]

My boss wants to be able to access a mac we have here in the office to do some invoicing from home. It's an OS 9 iMac, being used for nothing but serving a FileMaker data base to the 6 mac users in the office (the rest of the office is on PC's, and do not have access to the FileMaker database on the iMac).

The servers here in the office are Win 2000 pro machines, and handle all the file serving (except the FileMaker stuff), firewalling, internet access, etc....

The IT guys say she can't do it, security issues and all. I don't believe them. My wife does work from home thru VPN to her office all the time, and I know FileMaker can serve databases over the net no prob.

Can it be done? Are the IT guys being lazy?

TIA

[Scarpa]

Is there an existing VPN at your work?

What protocol does the iMac use to share the database?

If the answers are "yes", and "tcp/ip" then it should be trivial to access it using the existing VPN setup. If it uses Appletalk to share the database then the IT guys probably won't go for it, but I think it's still possible.

[EnVoy]

I don't know about an existing VPN. We are a small sattelyte office, our corporate office is in MN. The IT guys are there, and control everything (the servers and what not) from there. I would have to think they have VPN, cause their office is very large.

the FileMaker iMac uses tcp/ip.

[ghporter]

It is most likely technically possible to set up a workable VPN for your boss to do what he wants. The problem is that is can be extremely expensive to get started, both in software and manpower. This makes such connections economically impractical for small businesses. Your IT folks (and IT folks have never been known for their stellar explanation skills) may have equated "too expensive" with "impossible."