allowing employees to access their computer from home

[MrHappyMonkey]

I need a solution to be able to allow employees access to their office computer from their home or a remote location. We are currently having them connect through the net using PCAnywhere and connecting directly to the server running Windows 2000 server. I am thinking that a VPN would be a better way to this but, I am not sure if it'll do what I need. I need the employee to be able to access their machine from home as if they were in the office connected to the server through the off LAN. Is this what a VPN will do? Most of the employees are running Windows XP Pro on their laptops. Also, the net connection at the office is through a microwave-based net connection. The latency is around 150-200ms. The actual connection speed is at around 700kbps. Will this still be OK?

 

[Utterman]

VPN will allow access to files just like network neighboorhood. If you want to access the desktop just PCanywhere does, you can run terminal services.

If they are wanting just files access, then I suggest VPN connect, even though it will be a little slow.

 

[sml]

How many users does this need to scale to? If you're only talking about 5 users or so, I recommend getting a Cisco PIX 506 firewall appliance; it can support 5 [at least] VPN tunnels; Cisco makes a VPN client for a variety of operating systems, and you can do DES or 3DES tunnels over IPSEC. In fact, with XP I believe you can set up a native VPN connection to interface with Cisco. Performance is great with these little boxes. Of course, you could always do it for free with FreeBSD+racoon for IKE and IPSEC extensions built into the kernel with preshared keys

 

[MrHappyMonkey]

we are probably only looking to set this up for a couple of people. I am mainly looking to setup something with software instead of buying a piece of hardware. When using VPN, would they be connecting to the server or their actual computer's HD to get the info? I have the workstations configured to save all documents to a network drive. The only thing that the employee would need off of their HD would be their Outlook data. Would it be possible for them to use Outlook XP w/ VPN?

 

[sml]

When they connect in via VPN, you basically assign them an internal IP address and it's like they are logically sitting on your internal network, so drive mappings and whatnot as well as applications like Outlook will function fine. If you don't want to shell out the bucks, I think Win2000 server has a free PPTP server implementation built in, keep in mind this is not as secure as IPSEC for VPN.