I have a CentOS 5 web server which currently mounts a NFS export on my Mac OS X 10.7 laptop. It works great, except over VPN I can't get it to mount at all. I tried SMBUp but haven't been able to get it working even locally. It doesn't look like there's an easy way to install netatalk for CentOS 5. Even still, I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it.

I tried using a GUI SSH client that can "mount a FTP disk" and it would work, except the files require root access and there's no external root access and the client can't elevate permissions.

The basic thing I need to do is have the server be able to read the files off of my laptop, connected via VPN. The files are frequently updated (every 5-20 seconds) so I don't want to manually do that via SSH.

Which protocol can work with both platforms and easily handle the latency introduced by VPN (and potentially mobile broadband)?

Thanks