For some time now I’ve been remotely connecting to my machines at home via the mechanism of tunneling VNC and Terminal Services over SSH. This was a pretty secure (using SSH private keys) solution but a little cumbersome, as it required PuTTY configured in a very specific way to work.
I battled with the VPN support on my Netgear SG834G router, which was a terrible, un-documented, mind-melting mess (in the words of one Netgear forum poster – “I’ve been working with computers since ’92 and I have never seen more complicated and less supported software than this!“), but today I discovered a really elegant simple soultion…
There is a VPN server and client built into Windows XP! This page explains how to set up the server side, which is the real magic and I never knew this functionality was available in XP Pro. The client end is a total doddle
W00t – simple and easy connections to home, just wondering how secure it is now…
- You should check out hamachi. It does the same thing except with no configuration @ all. While this may make it somewhat limiting I have found it very reliable and functional. Its great for games and sharing files. Check it out:
http://www.hamachi.cc/