[ale] HomeVPN

[JD]

On 11/09/2012 10:08 AM, Robert L. Harris wrote:
> 
> Setting up a VPN at home for my laptop and (hopefully) mobile android devices.
>    I've got the first device working (laptop) easily enough. 
> 
> Has anyone else done this?  Anyone up for sharing configs/discussing?  There's
> so much information out there and still a lot of ambiguity.
> 
> Robert
> 
>  

There are lots of ways to do this.  I've been remoting home since around 1998
with ssh.  During international travel, often hotels will filter many, many,
many ports, so using a port that isn't filtered is **critical**.  Basically,
that means port 443.  Most security conscious companies will filter all ports
too, so expecting anything except 80/443 to get through their proxy server is
not realistic.

I just returned from a trip to Istanbul and used ssh/NX on port 443 for both ssh
and remote desktop access. It worked perfectly.  NX seems to be about 2-5x more
efficient than RDP or VNC methods and uses a cert + password for authentication
over the normal ssh server. Audio and video are the only things that I wouldn't
consider over it.. It doesn't depend on DNS+SSL Certs.  There currently isn't an
NX client for Android, so that could be a non-starter, though there is an alpha
APK available.

Of course, I've looked at IPSec and OpenVPN solutions.  Hopefully everyone hear
knows to avoid PPTP.  I've had IPSec working, but was unable to get it working
well enough on every platform I needed to trust.

OpenVPN has so many configuration options and managing the different certs for
all the clients was becoming a hassle. It also required a root'd device to work.
I never got the openvpn Android client working.

If all I need is an ssh connection, the ssh client built into Terminal IDE
(Android) has been more than sufficient.

What have you tried so far, which distro are you using and specifically, where
are you stuck?