Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 12:19 pm GMT +8

There are a lot of articles on how to setup home servers, so you can access them from work or other remote locations. The problem is that most, if not all, of these howtos were written 3 or 4 years ago, when all of us (your employer included) were a lot less paranoid about malware and internet security in general. Nowadays, your employer may restrict SSH, FTP or Telnet access to a very limited and specific number of sites.

Step 1.

Install a Virtual Network Computing (or VNC) Server on your home server. I use TightVNC as it also incorporates a basic FTP service, but there are plenty of other free VNC servers around (In no particular order, Ultra VNC, Real VNC, BeBits and so on – just google VNC Server).

• make sure you have a strong password,
• make sure you enable remote input.

Step 2.

Allow the outside world to access the VNC port of your Home Server. The idea is that you can direct Internet calls to your router, for services such as a web server (port 80), FTP server (Port 21), or other applications (i.e. VNC) through your Router to your internal network. The exact way of doing this depends on the Router you are using in your home network, but basically it will require to specify:

• the local IP address of the home Server,
• the protocol (I didn’t know whether to use TCP or UDP, so when I saw I could specify both, I did !!),
• the Port being used on the home server (from the VNC Server configuration screen), and
• the port that is being used from the internet.

I specified port 443 as this is a fairly important port number, so it won’t be blocked by your work or your ISP.

Step 3.

Assign a domain name for your home network, so you can access it without having to guess the IP address thats been assigned by your ISP.

Step 4.

Connect to your VNC server by installing a VNC Viewer on your work machine. I use the one that comes with TightVNC. Note the synatx of the address I’m connecting to; It consists of a web address, a colon and the second of the two port numbers I specified in the routing table.

Summary:

Installing a VNC Server on a system on your home network not only allows access to your home network, but depending on what your employer has firewalled, access to sites that you can not see at work. Accessing the VNC server over a generic port (such as port 80 or port 443) means there is very little chance of the port being blocked.

Warning:

I set this up specificaly to access work related videos and documents from sites that have been abused by others at work (i.e. youtube). It has proven useful for other things.

However, if your employer has a policy on internet usage (formal or otherwise), and they find you downloading or accessing material that the policy prohibits, you will probably be in trouble.