On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:47:55 -0400, "Bill Kearney"
<wkearney99@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> I also have PPTP VPN terminations
>> setup on my office and home routers. With DSL lines, it's *REALLY*
>> slow. I use these only for checking if I have any email or testing.
>
>I've had VPN's setup at home for quite a while. I would not call it "really
>slow". It's as fast as your uplink speed. I've had a 1.5/512 connection
>for a while and it's certainly faster than a 768/128.

I'm on 3.0/256 in the office and 1.5/256 at home. Those speeds work
fine for everything except the automagic updates that Microsloth and
every other vendor insists on dumping on one's machine without asking.
I have to turn off all that stuff on my laptop in order to use my
laptop effectively through a slow connection. If I don't use my
laptop for perhaps a week, I'm guaranteed a few megabloats of
downloads before I can start using the laptop.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with splitting the traffic on the
laptop. The email traffic goes to my home router VPN which I treat as
a proxy server. Everything else goes through the gateway on the
coffee shop wireless router. I haven't been in one place with my
laptop long enough to set it up correctly, or be sure it's working,
but it seems like a reasonable compromise.

>One other alternative to VPN is to use a remote desktop session. This way
>you connect to your home PC as a video client. RDP takes about 20k per
>session, more than usable over a 128k link. You can't watch full motion
>video through it but it's good for nearly everything else. If you don't
>want to use RDP you could use VNC instead. There's lots of ways to make it
>work.

I use RealVNC extensively. Works well but is slow. So is MS Remote
Desktop, GoToMyPC, and PC Anywhere. What's odd is that they are slow
at different things. Each one seems to optimize some part of the
puzzle, at the expense of others. Weird.

>The single biggest hassle to using your own home connection is the dynamic
>IP address. Sign up for a dynamic DNS service and set it up on your router.
>I'll work well enough most of the time.

I've been using DynDNS for years. I think I'm up to about 30
machines. No problems except compatibility issues with broken built
in DynDNS clients found in some routers.
<http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/hardware/>

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558