Need help with VPN (Solved)

Bogtrotter

I spend some time in France each year and my neighbour kindly lets me have access to his wifi network in exchange for helping out doing a few odd jobs around the house.

Unfortunately he's returning to the UK permanently and I am going to have to start using public wifi hotspots or bite the bullet and get a phoneline and broadband installed.

A new line is going to be expensive and open hotspots are not very secure. I know that you can buy VPN services for secure internet access from public open wifi hotspots but being a moneysaver I don't like spending money if its possible to do it myself

I have a Windows XP machine with a 12meg down 1meg up ADSL that runs 24/7 in the UK that I can access though the Windows PPTP VPN. At the moment it just allows me to access my files and backup when away from home. When I am connected to the VPN I cannot browse the internet until I disconnect from the VPN.

Is there any quick and easy way to route internet traffic though my home machine while using public wifi in France to secure my pop3 email and websites which dont fully use https for logging in?

Probi

One way would be to use something like remote desktop so that through your VPN you could connect to your home PC and then browse the internet from there. Only problem with that would be that your home PC would have to be running the whole time you were away.

I'm sure someone else will be along with a better answer soon but this was just an easyish way i could think of doing it.

HTH

Bogtrotter

Not worried about the PC on when I'm away as its never switched off anyway.

I thought about remote desktop but browsing on a remote computer is generally very "clunky" due to the bandwidth required everytime a page is scrolled in the browser. Also it would be nice to have the possiblity of using BBC iplayer / youtube when abroad.

Bogtrotter

Just an update in case anyone else wants to ensure their internet browsing is secure when using public open wifi hotspots.

I couldn't get a VPN connection to work but had success with something called a secure shell (SSH).

For Windows you install a SSH server (the one I used is called WinSSHD) on a trusted computer. Then you use a SSH client (I used PuTTY) on your laptop to connect to your trusted computer. After you connect to the trusted machine when you change the proxy settings of your browser all traffic is requested and passed back through a secure encrypted connection between your laptop and trusted machine.

The only real downside if there is one is that the maximum download speed is limited to the upload speed of the trusted machine. Not a problem if you have BT Infinity other LLU providers with an upload in excess of 1meg but may be an issue if you have plain ADSL with maybe 0.3-0.4 meg upload.