Hello all.
I want to start by saying that I just have some general knowledge when it comes VPN in general.
A while ago, I asked someone how I could connect my home PC to another PC at work. I wanted to establish a connection as if my home PC is on LAN with work PC. This way I access the "E:" drive of my work PC from home as if its connected on LAN. I was advised to use “Remote Access VPN”.
I searched the term and got a lot of info but I’m seriously confused on what I’m supposed to do. Can anyone give me some pointers on how to get started or if there’s some sort of service offered where I can at least trial the said said for a few days to see if it works?
If it helps, I have Teamviewer access to the work PC if it requires any sort of setup.
A VPN is an encrypted tunnel. Anything you send in one side will pop put on the other side. You want a VPN server on your computer at work. For example OpenVPN, WireGuard, $otherVpnProduct. This is something you have to setup on your own.
Because you said work computer I strongly advise you to talk to your IT before doing something on your own.
One of the biggest issues here is you’ll need to do some configuring on your office network too
Teamviewer has VPN capabilities.
Hello,
you can do it via software following this tutorial, hope it helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=095v7ZTkxMA
Hmm ok. IF its me, and all i need is to access my files in my home drive/s, I would just mirror them to the cloud and access them anywhere or whenever I’m not at home. I am using this service called idrive with 2TB and more than enough to mirror a few of my servers and pc and phone and etc…
As for VPN, the setup is not that simple for your case, you need to have a good understanding of network setup and maintaining that vpn.
Your LAN are not safe please Enabled Firewall to make sure your pc is more safer
OpenVPN
I tried OpenVPN and managed to follow most instruction but at some point I was not even sure whether it was supposed to do what I wanted. So I just rolled back everything. I’ll try to give it another go.
talk to your IT
That’s the issue. There’s no IT and I’m stuck with using Teamviewer. I mean, I can do the job while using Teamviewer but there’s so much tabbing between my own PC and the work PC that I feel I need to look for a more final solution specially if I’m going to work from home for an extended period of time. I’m trying to look into a solution that could help my colleagues within the department as well.
I do have access to the router if that’s what you mean.
Is that E drive a network share? Or is physically in your computer?
That’s the issue. There’s no IT and I’m stuck with using Teamviewer.
Yep, full stop right here. You’re going to open yourself and your company up to potential security risks and data loss by trying to configure this yourself.
OK great, so you know what type of router it is?
To put it really simply you need a VPN server on the office side of the connection and a VPN client on your side
Sorry if I am not too familiar with the terms but I’ll try to explain in the best possible way.
My work computer have access to the E:\ drive which is located on another PC (which I’ll call Main PC). My colleagues and myself connect to the E:\ drive of the main PC. I do have Teamviewer access of the Main PC as well.
I’m using my work PC (which has C:\ drive where windows is installed and D:\ drive for all my work files) as “test” bench to try to setup up this connection first which I was going to do with D:\ to see if it works before working with the Main PC to connect to E:.
Yes. I know the brand and reference of the router and also the login/pass to the router. I’ve accessed it in the past to change the WIFI code in the past.
Okay so your E drive is a network share. If it would be physical I’d have suggested that you get your computer and take it home 
With the VPN you’ll face one big problem: You won’t be able to connect from the internet to it without access to the router/firewall in your office.
The solution to this is to use a let the computer connect to you but then you need knowledge about ip routing and server hosting.
TeamViewer is easy for the end user because they tunnel everything over their servers. I’m not too familiar with teamviewer but it looks like it has a “VPN” built in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh7e-9kHPjY
Maybe try that and see if that helps.
What brand is it? Some small business and prosumer routers come with easy to set up vpn systems
Ah, OK, I think your best option here might be to try and follow this guide
This should be enough info to setup a basic VPN without any extra software
An extra point, it briefly covers forwarding ports, but not in great detail, which is an important step
To forward a port, you need to find the port forwarding section on the office router, usually easy to find in the settings menus. And you simply need to forward port 1723 to the IP address the VPN is running on (presumably your personal office PC). It should be self explanatory once you’re in there
Once you’ve got a working connection, getting the connection to the network drive should be pretty trivial
Give this all a go and let us know if you get stuck
