I am pleased to report that we now have a Virtual Private Network (VPN) running from our home and my mobile workstation to our office space, which means it will be easy to log in remotely and do work from anywhere in the world.
It should especially be helpful for Jenni, as she’s been wanting to connect to her Mac G5 workstation from home for quite some time. She does a lot of graphic design work, and it’s going to be nice to be able to spend some time at home working on her projects rather than always being stuck at the office.
OpenVPN is a fairly cool project, although I noticed that it’s either their documentation or OpenBSD’s unique way of doing things that made for a few snags getting it set up. Particularly, generating a certificate authority and the client and server keys didn’t go as expected, and I wish now that I had documented the errors I got and how I resolved them so I could post the solution here, but I was swept up in the installation at the time and forgot to take notes. Sorry!
Otherwise, once I got the CA set up and the client keys installed on the client machines, everything went smoothly, so now I’m able to connect with my laptop and ping all the other machines on the remote network as if they were local workstations. Hooray!
The other problem arose when I was trying to remotely manage our LinkSys WRT54G; it apparently doesn’t like to be remotely managed over the web, so I ended up installing TinyProxy on a machine behind the router and proxying my way in through an SSH tunneling session.
If this all sounds a bit complicated just to get remote access working, well, it was, but I think in the long run it will be worth it. I’ve just got a bit more configuration to do at home before everything will be working 100% correctly, so it feels good to see the light at the end of the tunnel (no pun intended) and know that it’s not just the headlight of an oncoming train.