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I'm going to be opening a doctor's office, with a computer system run
off a server in the office. I'd like to be able to access the system
remotely when I'm sitting at home, or even in a coffee shop through
their wireless network.

I have 2 questions:

1) How do I best set up the access itself? I have been advised that
the Windows remote desktop is the most economical approach to be able
to get into my system, but I'm concerned that it might be slow. I've
been advised to try GoToMyPC as well, but this would probably be slower
than I'd like. Currently, I access the computer where I work using VPN
and Citrix (they're both involved, but I don't understand which does
what, or even what they are really). I was told that this would cost
me about $5000 in my new practice, which might be more than I'd want to
spend.

2) Is it possible to have security when sitting in a public place using
an unsecured network? It seems to me that such a thing is possible if
the system encrypts at the server and decrypts at my laptop and vice
versa. That way anybody capturing my transmissions on the unsecured
wireless network would just get encoded data. Does such a thing exist?

Thanks for any help you can provide. --Matt

VPN using l2tp is the most secure option. RDP is very secure and by default
XP/Windows 2000/2003 use strong encryption for the entire RDP session and if
you are connecting to a Windows 2003 server with SP1 you can use RDP over
SSL as described in the link below to further secure RDP. The reason I like
l2tp so much is because both computer and user authentication are required
in l2tp via a computer certificate installed on both the VPN server and VPN
client and ipsec is used for encryption. With RDP anyone that can guess your
password can connect to your RDP server. L2tp has problems with NAT however
and a Windows 2003 VPN server can work with NAT-T. --- Steve

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodte ... 248b0.mspx