Once connected the laptop will act as if it is on your home network, so you can do anything you could do with the laptop when on home wifi or ethernet.

You 'get' nothing but a (secure) local ip address.

But then you can access your desktop using a remote desktop program like VNC.
Your router's admin interface will be available just as it would if the laptop was connected to it via wifi.

Personally I run OpenVPN on my server (up 24/7) and use wake-on-lan to start up my desktop machine should I need to VNC to its desktop.
I could probably save some energy by running OpenVPN on my pi instead, sleeping the server and waking up the server should I need to access files on it.

Neil

On 11 January 2015 15:20:29 GMT+00:00, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I'm thinking about using a VPN for remote access to my desktop machine
when out and about.

The obvious choice (?) is to run an OpenVpn server on my desktop
machine and clients on my laptop or whatever when I'm away.  I won't
want to get access from 'foreign' machines on which I don't have
the ability to install stuff.

I've wandered around the OpenVpn website and can follow (I think!) all
the technical stuff about how to install it etc. and how to run
clients.

What I don't understand and nowhere seems to tell me is what it
actually does for me as a user.  I mean there I am away from home
somewhere and I've connected to the server using the OpenVpn client -
then what?  I don't think I get a home machine desktop as such, so
what do I get?  If I want to access my address book or configure my
router what do I do?