Using Samba (SMB) Remotely?

[Striker]

Today I was attempting to use Samba remotely to use my home directory on my server, but I noticed that I couldn't get through.

I guess the ports are blocked; which is fine...So instead, I loaded up and compiled stunnel and used it to make an SSL tunnel from my gateway machine here at work to my server and connect via the tunnel to samba...

This really isnt a support question it's more of a 'Is this acceptable' question... So ...Is this acceptable?
I assume that the ports are blocked merely to safeguard the incredibly secure Windows Servers (sorry, I just had to say that :p)

[Tino Didriksen]

I haven't had troubles using SMB from SB to my home computer when I used it, so it's a new thing if they blocked the ports.

[knightfoo]

The NetBIOS ports (135,139,445) have been filtered for quite some time. We had to do this because of the incredible amount of pop-up spam using the Windows Messaging Service. It is perfectly OK to use stunnel or any other VPN software to mount SMB shares over the Internet. If you're using stunnel or the VPN, the ports would not be accessible from the outside and thus not exploitable. If everyone did this (Windows included) it wouldn't be necessary to filter as many ports :)

-knightfoo