On 12 January 2015 at 15:18, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
My most likely requirement is to be able to get at the web configuration pages of router(s), NAS systems, etc. which aren't accessible from outside. Having run the VPN client on the laptop how do I view one of these in Firefox on the laptop? Does it 'just work' in exactly the same way as when I'm at home - e.g. I can just put "http://mikrotik/" into the browser address bar or is there some extra indirection involved?
Certainly it should work with an IP address instead of relying on DNS as in your example.
With any VPN connection you need to ask yourself the question: If I'm connected to the VPN, where should traffic go that's not destined for my VPN? In some cases (and likely yours) you'd want it to go to the Internet as it would otherwise have done; ie if you search Google for something there's no reason for that traffic to be sent via your home network. On the other hand in other cases that's precisely why you have the VPN (eg to appear as if you're in the UK when you're not). Setting that up depends on the VPN client so I won't go into it here (nor am I the expert you should ask!), but for the former case (which I think is what you want) you'd likely expect to be using external DNS so http://mikrotik/ wouldn't work, but http://192.168.0.1/ (or whatever) would. The important point being that 192.168.0.1 is exactly the same IP address you could have used had you been directly connected and not using a VPN, and the router will see the connection as having come from the local network (because in effect it has) not remotely. (So you could put mikrotik into your hosts file and it would work whether at home or remotely.)
To answer your other question: If you want to access a PC that's sitting on your home network when you're away, you do that the same way you would if you were sitting at home wanting to access another PC from your laptop, which becomes a remote desktop question rather than a VPN one. So you might use remote desktop or X or VNC or SSH, etc, as if you were local.