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?
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?
-- Chris Green
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On 11 Jan 2015, at 15:20, Chris Green wrote:
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?
You get your laptop, out and about, to appear as a machine on your home network. So you can access everything you've got firewalled off from the internet, NAS backup disks, printers, RaspberryPi cameras and the like. I've got 3 vpn's set up, one for getting in to my home network from outside, one on a AWS instance for bypassing geolocation and one to the 44.*.*.* ham network, so my radio-connected Pi appears in the same network as the rest.
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 02:45:36PM +0000, William Hill wrote:
On 11 Jan 2015, at 15:20, Chris Green wrote:
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?
You get your laptop, out and about, to appear as a machine on your home network. So you can access everything you've got firewalled off from the internet, NAS backup disks, printers, RaspberryPi cameras and the like. I've got 3 vpn's set up, one for getting in to my home network from outside, one on a AWS instance for bypassing geolocation and one to the 44.*.*.* ham network, so my radio-connected Pi appears in the same network as the rest.
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?
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.
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Chris Green -
Mark Rogers -
Neil Sedger -
William Hill