Hi,

I'm trying to figure out the best way for me to access my research data at home when I am on the road. On my computer at home, I have literally hundreds of gigs of data that I have accumulated from different simulations, reports, etc., and is not practical for me to carry all of this data around. I could get an external hard drive, but my simulations take a *long* time to run and can't have it run on my laptop since it's off quite a bit.

I was wondering what the best way would be to set up a secure VPN to connect back to my computer in Raleigh when I'm on the road. I know I can't use it to pull up huge several GB files, but most of the stuff I work with directly are small text files and diagrams no larger than like 2 or 3 MB.

I have tried using FTP and some other means to transfer the files back and forth, but I found it not to be very reliable and lost a huge chunk of my work one time due to a bad transfer. I've also used Windows Remote Desktop, but don't really need to have my entire display sent over, and is slow when I'm at a hotel or such with a slow Internet connection.

I have been doing some research on setting up VPNs, but don't really know what I would need to do to get started. I have a PC at home and my laptop is a Mac, which I recently learned has built-in VPN client. Everything I see for Windows is the Cisco VPN client but that isn't free as I have found out from their website.

I appreciate any advice/suggestions.

Thanks,
Joe

9/9/2005 11:25:03 AM