I have been working on a remote Windows server this week without access to a VPN. This has involved using IE to access a web app that then takes control of the remote server (with some intervention on the server by it’s administrator). Every time I get disconnected (which is surprisingly often) I have to call their server administrator and have them reconnect me. It is driving me crazy.
The thing is, Windows contains pretty good remote access software in Remote Desktop. Unfortunately there is no way to do a reverse connection. That would be the idea situation.
I am really tempted to use some fancy stunneling and maybe some sort of auto-reconnecting daemon to create a one-off VPN to allow me to use Remote Desktop. Surprisingly I haven’t found any examples of people doing this.
Note: This is another reason that an Intel Mac would be the ideal work station for me even though I am working in primarily Windows environments. Having UNIX services and commands available natively would make things like this even easier. I am ending up creating a pseudo UNIX on my Windows laptop (bash, coreutils, putty, stunnel, etc).
