vpn-smb-sync

❓ Problem

Do you know that situation of being at a university and your profs use an oldschool SMB share in the university network to handout teaching material?

The manual process of connecting, mounting and getting the latest files takes quite a while everytime something has been updated.

💡 Solution

This simple script tries to solve this problem by doing all of the following work for you ;)

• ✅ Connects to the VPN in an isolated docker container (using openconnect) (so the rest of your computer will be still connected to the current network)
• ✅ Mounts the SMB share into your container (using cifs)
• ✅ Syncs desired folders to a docker volume respectively a local folder (using rsync)

Usage

Build

docker build -t vpn-smb-sync .

Examples

IMPORTANT: Please note that we have to provide quite strong kernel capabilities to the container, so it's not recommended to use it for any other purpose than personal usage!

Run the container in interactive mode (by typing the password manually) and sync the folders folder1,folder2/childfolder to /home/user/sync:

docker run -it --rm --cap-add NET_ADMIN --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --cap-add DAC_READ_SEARCH \
    -v /home/user/sync:/app/target \
    -e VPN_SERVER=vpn.server.com \
    -e USERNAME=myusername \
    -e SMB_SHARE=//smb.server.com/share \
    -e SMB_COPY_FOLDERS=folder1,folder2/childfolder \
    vpn-smb-sync

Run the same above without any interaction:

docker run --rm --cap-add NET_ADMIN --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --cap-add DAC_READ_SEARCH \
    -v /home/user/sync:/app/target \
    -e VPN_SERVER=vpn.server.com \
    -e USERNAME=myusername \
    -e PASSWORD=mypassword \
    -e SMB_SHARE=//smb.server.com/share \
    -e SMB_COPY_FOLDERS=folder1,folder2/childfolder \
    vpn-smb-sync

Environment Variables

• VPN_SERVER (required): Hostname of the VPN server which shall be used to connect using openconnect
• SMB_SHARE (required): Address of the SMB share which shall be mounted within the container. Typically this address is something like //my-share.com/share.
• SMB_COPY_FOLDERS (required): Comma-separated list of child folders shall be recursively copied.
• USERNAME (required): Username which is used for the VPN- and SMB-Login.
• PASSWORD (optional): Password which is used for the VPN- and SMB-Login. If you don't want to provide it directly, you can also run the container in interactive mode (using -it) and type it manually.
• MAX_FILE_SIZE (optional, default: 50m): Max file size used during the copy process according to rsync --max-size=SIZE