How to VPN into my home computer

[billadas]

It seems from the information that I have received from Sonic that their VPN collector is not used to get into your home computer but to protect you when you are out in the wifi world. I want to set up a VPN into my home. Does anyone have information on how to do that? Do I need to get a VPN Router to place behind the Sonic Modem/Router?
Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated since this all new to me.
Thanks for any help.
Bil

[Guest]

The simplest way is to install an SSH server on one of your machines and forward port 22 to that machine. You would use some ssh client to create a secure tunnel to port 3389 for RDP or 5800/5900 for VNC. Leave the connection running and run either Remote Desktop or VNC viewer to connect to the machine, using the local port you're using to tunnel via ssh. From that machine you can have access to your LAN.

Some terms you should Google for:
1. port forwarding <your router model>
2. ssh tunneling rdp vnc

You can also use OpenVPN but it would take more setup and configuration. If you go this route, use L2TP and not PPTP since the latter has some vulnerabilities that won't go away with patching.

The disadvantage of using ssh is you would not have resources on your LAN like printers. You would need to forward other ports. But if you're just looking at accessing a machine's apps or transfer files on occasion, ssh tunneling will be sufficient.

Decide what kind of VPN you need: the more features you want the more work involved.