Remotely Access a PC over the net

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

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My colleague is going on paternity leave soon. He needs access to his PC (and files on our NAS) so we're either going to get a PC for him at home with AutoCAD on it, or enable some kind of connection to his work PC from home.

If we get him a laptop, how can he access the files on the NAS from home?

If he does some kind of remote desktop thing, how would we do it? He is under the impression he can use the Windows Remote Assistance but I think it is not really a permanent solution, probably not all that secure, and is very slow and sluggish if I remember correctly?

Any ideas? It's a small company with only a local network with about 10 normal Windows 7 PCs on it (and a NAS which I believe can't do VPS stuff) and no IT support!
 
The most Windows-centric way is a work VPN. I don't know how to set one up though. You could probably install OpenVPN on one of your machines and expose it to the internet to act as a makeshift VPN server.

Otherwise I'd use SSH tunnels, but not so Windowsy.
 
what nas, some synology nas feature vpn feature built in to allow the above like joeyjojo suggested.

It most likely has ftp server options so that's another option to get at the files. All you need to do is configure it for access from outside the network (ports on router etc) and set up accounts and you can access it from a home pc with a ftp program.

Personally I wouldn't bother trying to do autocad via remote access so would focus on just getting at the files
 
Something like auto-cad via remote desktop is going to be frustrating lol! but a VPN setup to get to files to work with on the machine he is using at home is relatively easy to setup but security should be something you pay attention to. My QNAP NAS can act as a VPN server configured through the router with minimal effort.
 
With no IT support you might not have access to the router to forward ports, which would be required to setup most of the above. However you could install Hamachi (it's free) on the PC at work, and leave the PC switched on. He could then install hamachi at home and that would create a VPN to the work PC so he could remote desktop, access files etc.
 
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