Before I had my Macs, I used the Microsoft VPN on one of my Windows servers to give myself access to the home network while on the road. It worked smoothly, and required little setup on the client machines.
While trying to eliminate physical machines in my house, one of the boxes set to get the axe was this Windows box. But how would I connect remotely?
Well, the answer, it turned out, took less than a half-hour to set up. I use IPCop for my firewalls (have for years, probably won’t switch to anything else, ever), and it turns out that someone has an OpenVPN plug-in for IPCop called ZERINA. A quick install and setup of ZERINA and I was ready to get my Mac connected. Then, I found a neat tool called Tunnelbick that provides a GUI for OpenVPN connections on the Mac. I found these instructions (scroll down to “MACINTOSH OSX:”) for setting it up with ZERINA, and they worked like a charm. After a quick run to McDonald’s a couple days later for their free WiFi via AT&T, I confirmed that everything was up, running, and working like a charm.