I’ve been working remote from Florida for the last couple of months and use a virtual POBox based in FL as my main mailing address. Nice weather and beaches are the only pro’s we can agree to which is why we want to pack up again and start driving off slowly towards the west coast.
Could I use some type of device I can take with me to connect my work laptop to so that I can make it seem like I’m still in Florida? How easy or hard would it be to set something like this up? Any tips?
My main goal would be to do this only while we drive around, once we find a new place I would let HR know with a more permanent address.
Edit to add:
We don’t have a permanent physical “home” address. We are jumping from short term rental to short term rental.
I am a big fan of Raspberry Pi platform.
Let me suggest you install a VPN at your FL home so you may logon to your home network from anywhere. Read more here https://www.pivpn.io Not hard to do, can get a bit technical at times though.
BTW it’s not necessary to use a RPi, most any Linux box will work.
The answer to your question is yes, but If you have your own (non-ISP) router, you should be able to get a vpn cert from it and then do what the other guy said- turn it on and connect to your home network from anywhere. Not only does this put you in Florida, it also protects you a bit more since you’re literally working from the same network you’d be on if you were sitting at home
You need a gl.inet travel router. A Beryl should work well for you.
Here’s how to do it:
Ok, I see you are “jumping from spot to spot”. Forget a hardware VPN anchored at your house. It seems you will need a commercial VPN that offers an endpoint in FL. They will maintain the hardware and give you a FL IP address. you’ll need to shop around a bit.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a “home” in the traditional sense, we’re basically jumping from short term rental to short term rental, thanks for the info though!
oh wait, does this also require a home network? I don’t have a permanent home, we are literally travelling gypsy’s.
Yep I use gl-Inet products at home and on the road
I hear ya! RPi got very scarce and correspondingly expensive in the pandemic. I bought a bunch pre-pandemic (just counted-11 pi’s) and and have been replacing the occasional power supply and SD card. I was going to expand the horizon and buy a nuc and I may yet.
Share your nuc experiences a bit if you don’t mind.
I don’t have any nucs but I do have a number of hp thin clients around the house. Living room and bedroom media centers running kodi on xubuntu. A vm server for my “must run” vms like Nagios, node-red, and mqtt. I use one as a serial console for other servers. USB hub with serial cables running to each server, conserver doing logging and console access.
As long as you have reasonable expectations, oldish thin clients can be cheap but effective.
I have 5 properties and put a pi on each network as a semi supervisor with pihole and piVPN. It just so happens that VNC allows 5 users for free so alls good.
I tended to be project oriented, so a new project sparked the need for a new pi! Integrated screen? New pi. Continuous speed test? New pi. Plex server? New pi. What’s that about pi Zero in gadget mode? New pi. I’ve slowed down a lot in the last 3 years.
My first exposure to thin clients. I had an employer on the verge of bankruptcy that used thin clients. I did some poking around and found that I was Xeon sharing processing power with 42 other clients around the east coast. Response was terrible but all the key presses were buffered so you could type ahead get a cup of coffee and by time you made it back, it was ready for you. Slight exaggeration there.
I guess a few thin client seats were much cheaper than so many MS Office licenses!
Early thin clients kind of sucked. (I have a few Compaq ipaqs I am saving from the landfill. They don’t even have USB 2.) Today’s thin clients aren’t exactly horrible little machines. I would have to check the specs on them but I think the ones I use as media centers have 4gb ram and dual core cpu. Not a powerhouse but they play 720p video just fine.
I was fascinated by the concept. I don’t remember much except my casual involvement came in +/- 2008.