For my two week project I decided it would be quite useful for me to set up a VPN server on my computer so I can remotely access music, pictures, and anything else I need from another computer. Eventually, I want to use this in order to be able to access all these files through my phone and stream them so I can access the files from anywhere.
Setting up the VPN was actually the easiest part of the whole thing. Windows makes it quite easy to set this up with the networking and sharing center. From this window, click on change adapter settings on the left hand side. In this window, go to file and create a new incoming connection. This is the VPN and it goes through a couple steps of setting up users and choosing if they can connect to your computer through the internet. The last window allows you to choose which protocols you want to use with your VPN, and then you can click on allow access. This will allow anyone with the correct credentials access your network.
Connecting to a VPN is just about as simple. Windows has a program in the start menu called "Setup a VPN connection". After entering the correct IP address and setting some optional settings, the program asks for your username and password to enter the network. As long as you are allowed access, you should be able to see the network with no issues.
One issue I ran into was being able to access resources on my VPN. While it was clear that the other computer was connected to my VPN, I could not see either one on the network from either computer. After way too much researching and a lot of wrong (at least for my situation) answers, I think I found the problem, but I won't be able to test it until tomorrow at the lab. Apparently, having two computers on a VPN from the same IP range gives windows sharing center some difficulties. I'm not sure why this is, but I was, unfortunately, not able to share files between the computers at this point in time, but I need to figure this out for later projects in the class since I wanted to build off each of them and hopefully come out with something interesting at the end.
