On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 12:19:12PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 22/03/14 00:59, Neil Sedger wrote:
If you don't need to access your remote machine then no you don't need a VPN.
Well it depends on the context, Chris I think your request would have made more sense within the context of the last thread ?
I use my home VPN not necessarily to gain access to resources at home but to tunnel my internet connection via my home gateway. This gets me around the ssh problem I have also encountered (as per the last thread) and means that if I use any unencrypted protocols then I am somewhat protected from snooping at the internet cafe end, or on larger wifi networks there have been reported issues with MitM attacks, which if you aren't paying attention could catch you out.
So you connect (say) your laptop 'out there' to your home VPN and then access other resources in the internet 'from' the VPN. I can't really think of anything I do that would fit into that set-up. Do you access the web via this route? I must admit I do simply connect to the web directly from my laptop or tablet, I very rarely use internet cafés, last time was several years ago.
It also sometimes manages to bypass some of the captive payment portals but that's another story :-)
It does also mean that if I wanted to access resources at home then I don't have to expose them directly to the public internet, so I only have to worry about one easy to monitor and manage thing being compromised.
Yes, I can understand that, though again I can't actually think of much that I do along these lines. What source of 'resources' at home do you access this way? All of my resources tend to be text files which can be looked at via ssh in a terminal window.