Tunelling into remote internet connection

Question

I have a computer at home in Boston. I'd like to set it up so that when I'm traveling and going online, it looks like I'm on my Boston computer. I used LogMeIn but (a) it's overkill since I don't need to access my computer and just need to use it's IP address (b) they charge a yearly fee and (c) it's slow to use the mouse and keyboard.

Is there a better way to "tunnel" through my Boston computer so it looks like I'm on that computer when I'm surfing the web on my travel laptop?

My Boston computer is a dual-boot that has XP and Ubuntu on it.

Answer 1

You could setup your Boston machine as a Proxy, details here. The only catch being you would either need a static ip on the internet for your Boston machine or would have to find a way to figure out its ip every time you want to connect to internet using it.

UPDATE: There are many free DNS service providers like OpenDNS, FreeDNS, etc. Alternatively you can use this tool to email you the internet ip of your machine periodically.

Answer 2

I would personally set up a VPN Server on either the Windows install or the Ubuntu install.

Which version of Windows XP are you using? If it's XP Professional, then it's got native support for acting as a VPN Server - check out: http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/xp_vpn_server.htm.

If you're running XP Home, then I'd probably run my VPN Server on Ubuntu - I'd also go with OpenVPN as the server software. There is a guide here: http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-maverick. It looks daunting - but it's not actually THAT bad.

Answer 3

It depends on what OS your laptop is.

You can easily just use SSH tunneling. For example, between two Linux machines you can run "ssh -D 10000 ". This will create a SOCKS 5 proxy server on your local machine (your laptop), then setup your laptop's browser to use that SOCKS 5 proxy server.

If you have Windows on your laptop, use PuTTY to connect to your home computer running Ubuntu. To do so, just follow this guide: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/use-putty-as-a-secure-proxy-on-windows/421

It is the same concept as the Linux to Linux proxy, but you need PuTTY to interact through SSH.

You'll also want to setup a Dynamic DNS, something like DynDns.org