OT: VPN?

[James Sentman]

In this case you don’t really want a VPN back to your home like Mike is setting up. I have experimented with the Apple VPN built into OSX server and have it running here. I use it when I want to log into XTension from an untrusted wifi access point somewhere. 

A VPN opens a big encrypted pipe to whatever the VPN server is and your computer or phone then appears to all the world as if it’s on your home network, or the home network of the machine running the VPN server. So to your phone or laptop it feels like it’s sitting at home on your very own wifi or wired network and the communications between your laptop and the server are encrypted. The built in VPN for OSX server would let you access the web remotes in XTension or the VNC into them with security regardless of any people sniffing the wifi network for unencrypted packets.

Though surfing the internet and doing your homework through such a system would work, it would be limited by the speed of your home’s pipe to the internet. Any web request you make on the laptop at the library would be encrypted, sent to your server at home backwards through your cable modem then forwarded back up to the internet, the response would come back down your cable modem, be encrypted at yoru server and then sent back up your cable modem to the laptop ;) So it becomes a very roundabout thing and the speed of it will be half what your home internet speed is, or less as it relies on the upstream traffic speed of your cable modem for re-sending the data to the laptop and the upstream traffic is always much slower than the downstream traffic for such things.

What you really need if you are concerned about someone snooping on your daughters web searches as she does her homework at the library is a commercial VPN service. There are several that aren’t that expensive. But I’m not really sure what you gain from this. Tell the library to add a password to their open wifi network so the traffic cannot be sniffed. Or if using the libraries own computers then you’re already on the wired network and gain little to nothing except making it harder for the CIA to crack your encryption by using a VPN ;) But regardless you’ll be paying a monthly fee for such a service.

Doing homework does not sound like something that would benefit from a VPN, and logging into your bank or other such service is already encrypted over HTTPS/SSL and so gains nothing from a VPN except to hide the real IP address that you’re using to log in from. 

For talking to my home running a VPN to the house definitely makes sense (though I do connect to XTension over HTTPS connections anyway I”m just a little bit paranoid ;) ) connecting to google for research of your homework assignments will do little than slow them down. It keeps google from logging your traffic via IP address, but not from getting the google account cookies that they actually use to track you. Unless you go to a lot of trouble to obfuscate your origins they still know it’s you and so would the federal government if they were targeting you for data harvesting. Or if you were in the same library as someone else they were targeting… but thats a whole separate conversation… What exactly are you trying to avoid or protect yourself from by using a VPN?



> On Oct 16, 2017, at 12:03 PM, Dee Dee Sommers <deesquared at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Mike!
> That is really my concern: a VPN to use when I travel or for my daughter when she goes to the library to do schoolwork.
> 
> This is great!
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.machomeautomation.com/pipermail/xtensionlist/attachments/20171016/b2fe51d1/attachment.html>