VPN and Remote Desktop

[gabi]

I have two laptop computers. A newer one for work, running Win XP Pro, and an older one that I should have simply recycled, but I thought I'd put PC-BSD on for kicks, and see how it felt. It feels pretty good and after four successive installs I think I now have a working system. Now I am seriously considering going with PC-BSD on both computers. But before I do that, I need to make sure that everything I do under XP I can do just as well under PC-BSD.

I am a freelance economist. I make my living with Stata (http://www.stata.com) and R (cran.r-project.org) both of which run under BSD. But I sometimes work off my clients' servers, through a VPN and Remote Desktop Connection. Those servers are Windows 2000 machines, so when I open a remote desktop connection the screen looks and feels very familiar. Data are on the D:/ drive, installed programs such as MS Access are on the C:/ drive, there's a startup menu, everything. It's no different from working on my own Windows computer.

Could I do that from a PC-BSD machine? I installed the OpenVPN port and the Kovpn front-end, but now I am stumped. The OpenVPN needs to be configured and there's a sample client.conf file here http://openvpn.net/howto.html#client, but I have no clue what I should change in it, or where it should go on my computer. I had hoped Google would drop into my lap a blog that described the process, but no such luck.

Same goes for Kovpn, though that thing at least came with a readme file. Has anybody done anything like this before?

Thank you,
Gabi

[Oko]

I have two laptop computers. A newer one for work, running Win XP Pro, and an older one that I should have simply recycled, but I thought I'd put PC-BSD on for kicks, and see how it felt. It feels pretty good and after four successive installs I think I now have a working system. Now I am seriously considering going with PC-BSD on both computers. But before I do that, I need to make sure that everything I do under XP I can do just as well under PC-BSD.

I am a freelance economist. I make my living with Stata (http://www.stata.com) and R (cran.r-project.org) both of which run under BSD. But I sometimes work off my clients' servers, through a VPN and Remote Desktop Connection. Those servers are Windows 2000 machines, so when I open a remote desktop connection the screen looks and feels very familiar. Data are on the D:/ drive, installed programs such as MS Access are on the C:/ drive, there's a startup menu, everything. It's no different from working on my own Windows computer.

Could I do that from a PC-BSD machine? I installed the OpenVPN port and the Kovpn front-end, but now I am stumped. The OpenVPN needs to be configured and there's a sample client.conf file here http://openvpn.net/howto.html#client, but I have no clue what I should change in it, or where it should go on my computer. I had hoped Google would drop into my lap a blog that described the process, but no such luck.

Same goes for Kovpn, though that thing at least came with a readme file. Has anybody done anything like this before?

Thank you,
Gabi

Speaking of VPN you have to tell me first which VPN server your company is using?
My University is using Cisco 3000 which sucks but for idiots who like proprietary things
it is very common solution. So I had to compile VPNC client for Ciscso 3000.
I could walk you through the installation and configuration of the client side as it is trivial.
The sad part is that Ciscso 3000 is so stupid that you have to turn off PF all together
in order to use it.


Configuration of OpenVPN server is not a joke and you will have to find the documentation on the Internet and read it.

Configuration of the client side for OpenVPN is trivial but I do not use OpenVPN client so I would have to
remain myself little bit

VNC or the remote graphical access is trivial and the client side is by default included in your PC-BSD look under KRDC.



For the server side very easy to configure too and this is an excellent howto
http://www.freebsddiary.org/tightvnc.php

[TerryP]

KRDC should also connect via RDP if you install rdesktop, just like using an XP machine to remote desktop into another (home had client, pro & mce had server).


I have my desktop setup to allow the connection and can use my PC-BSD laptop, used to do this last year to shutdown the desktop after leaving it online to do some long running operation.