Ask HN:What VPN service do you use?

[ggrewal]

I am a Mechanical PhD student and need to access a number of University workstations(Win XP/7 and Ubuntu) from home from a MAC/Windows. What is a cheap/free VPN solution? There is no static external IP at home. The university provides a cisco vpn client but it is very slow. I have used gbridge successfully between the windows machine but its not cross platform.

I need the link to be suitable to access a few OpenGl windows with the plots of data(which don't always get across). What remote access software should I be using? There is rdp on the windows machines and freenx on the ubuntu. And for the client I have remmina on ubuntu and rdp&nomachine client on windows.

All advice is greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

[bincat]

Does the university's workstations have publicly accessible ip? Do you have admin right to run vpn type of service on it? If so you can run OpenVPN in p2p mode (with no remote option it just listens on a given lport). All application traffic (rdp, freenix, tightvnc, etc) goes over the tunnel.

Mac http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick Windows http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html#late...

As far as the slowness is concerned it might be due to the software that you're using to look at the remote screen. I know tightvnc can go across cable modem type of isp connection well. But don't expect it to be superfast. UltraVNC is good too, but it's not interoperable with tightvnc and it is Windows only.

[vkdelta]

Couple of things:

1. You will able to use something like OpenVPN for windows/mac. But you will decode the configuration of the tunnel and encryption parameters from the Cisco VPN profile (try looking in your programs files/Cisco systems/... /profiles/ directory)

2. But using any other client will not really help to increase the throughput /performance.

3. Throughput is limited by WAN link (probably a slow DSL modem) and also university's VPN server.

4. I have used Cisco VPN to log in to university workstations during my grad school days. It was pretty good. I had 12x1 services at my apt.

What type/speed of Internet service do you currently have?

[stonemetal]

Not sure how much control you have over the remote machines, you could do something like ssh and VNC. TightVNC has a client that supports ssh tunneling.