On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 12:59:49AM +0000, Neil Sedger wrote:
If you really need those ports open to the world then no, no gain there. I thought open SMTP was an internet no-no?
No use if I want to connect from, say, someone else's machine, or from an Internet Café.
Yes that's what it's for. You don't need to restrict on IP address. You do need your private key which for OpenVPN is in a tiny text file.
If my home desktop *wasn't* a web server and an ssh server then the above might be of use but as it is I don't see a lot of point.
Indeed it's very similar to ssh, just more flexible. You can setup ssh to tunnel all ports you need but with VPN you don't have to bother.
You still haven't told me what I can actually *do* from a remote machine connected to my VPN server. Having access to my home machine as if it was on a LAN with the remote machine doesn't really strike me as particularly useful, it's not as if I have a typical business environment with everyone sharing files on a server or anything like that.
If you don't need to access your remote machine then no you don't need a VPN. I use it rather than ssh because there's no need to tunnel ports, so e.g. my phone can easily see my samba shares, mediaserver, VNC desktops, access my smtp server... It can be done with ssh tunnelling but it's a bit more fiddly.
OK, thanks, you've at least confirmed what the VPN can do for me. I've only one use for ssh tunnelling (a reverse connection back to an 'unmanned' remote machine behind firewall/NAT) so I'm not sure that VPN really does anything very useful for me.