Developers, particularly web developers, have a need to work on external computers, often not within their local networks.  Over the years I’ve employed everything from FTP to SFTP/SCP to Samba to NFS to VPNs to cranky Novell networks.  All have their downsides, particularly with regard to security. I have a MacPro and originally ran NFS to connect to machines on my LAN.  But as Apple released new versions of OSX it became more hostile to NFS, to the point where it because unusable with my Ubuntu-hosted web server.  I retreated back to