Sharing an Airport disk over the Internet

So I've been trying to find answers to this for about forever now, and have had no luck. Here's what I'm trying to do.

I have a Time Capsule (1TB) at my small business (only about 4 or 5 people will ever be accessing it, and usually not at the same time). I want to be able to use it as a NAS, or a pseudo-server, so that we can dump our spreadsheets there and be able to access them and keep them updated for everyone all the time. Sharing the drive over the network is no big deal. The problem is sharing the drive over the Internet. The Airport Utility shows this as an option (using Bonjour), and I have it checked with passwords and user names assigned, but I haven't been able to figure out how to access it off site. There's no Apple documentation that I can find, and every thread out there I've looked for has led basically nowhere. I know you can do this using MobileMe pretty easily, but not all of our employees have MobileMe or even want to pay for it.

But then there's another kink. While most of us use Macs, we have one guy that uses a PC. Unfortunately, he's the one that does most of the work on the spreadsheets, so he needs to be able to access it too. How do I connect to the drive over the Internet using SMB sharing?

The other issue here is linking. The reason I'm trying to set this up is so that I can add links from one spreadsheet to another, but in order for Excel to keep these links from being broken, the linked sheet can only have a static address, which is why something like Dropbox just won't work. Google Docs doesn't support linking either, ruling that out. If I could get this set up, would the links be preserved? Obviously, the easiest thing to do would be to just get a server, but that's a bit out of the budget of our young company right now, especially considering the one guy who would be able to maintain it long term (me) won't be working there for much longer.

As an addendum, I've read that there are some problems doing this with the Time Capsule's internal drive, so if it would be easier to just connect an external hard drive to the USB port and share that, I can do it. Does anybody have any input here?

I know this is long and in depth, but I'd really appreciate some help. Thanks in advance.

 

well to make it quick and easy ... find an old linksys WRT-54GL router, flash the firmware to DD-WRT VPN edition and add a small NAS unit like a D-Link DNS-323 to it. setup PPTP on the router and you are set. I HATE time capsules for network data as they dont posess RAID redundancy and I have had bad luck running them through tunnels

 

I don't think the drive is set up to do any of that... you'd need to SSH or VPN or whatever and actually be on the network remotely, then you should be able to access it.

you might want to actually buy a NAS drive that is made to do that, and not use Apple

like here is a case that supports 2 drives (and you can RAID 1 (mirror) them) and has FTP access built in...

NewEgg.com Link

there are other brands and such too that have similar products.

 

if you are just updating documents, you could setup a FTP server.