Need an easy VPN solution

SSH tunnel

While not a true VPN solution, you can get a lot done securely with SSH tunnels, and they are very easy to setup. For example, assuming you have "Remote Login" turned on in the Sharing settings in System Preferences on the remote machine:

ssh -NfD 1234 yourusername@yourremotehost

Gets you a SOCKS proxy through your SSH connection on port 1234 that you can then setup in the Network portion of System Preferences for things like your web browser, or any other app that supports the global proxy settings.

Also, you can forward ports directly, so for example, let's say you wanted to access screen sharing on the remote machine:

ssh -L5901:localhost:5900 yourusername@yourremotehost

That would then allow you to go to the "Go"->"Connect to Server", and type in vnc://localhost:5901 to get to the remote machine's VNC server.

You can do similar things for other services like AFP, etc. And you aren't limited to only forwarding to the remote machine. You can forward the port to any other machines on the remote network as well. And best of all, it's all encrypted (between the client and your remote machine, anyway)

Cheers!

Your issue here is likely to be the work network. Unless your work computer has a publicly routable IP, but I'd guess it is behind a firewall and has a NAT'ed address. In this case you're going to be forced to talk to the IT staff to get things setup.

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