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Bill Paetzke
Asked: 2010-07-26 16:35:37 +0800 CST

How to access both Dev and Production systems from home?

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I'm setting up a home office for telecommuting to my employer. I'm a software engineer. I need access to both our Dev servers (located at the employer) and our Production servers (located at our 3rd-party hosting company).

I'm under the impression that I can VPN into only one network at a time (i.e. only my employer or the hosting company). But that's not acceptable because I need access to both at the same time to do my job. For instance, if I need to move a file from Dev to Production. Or run a SQL query on Dev and compare the results with Production.

How can I access both environments? Or if the answer is highly dependent on some things, what details do I need to get? Does the hosting company need to change some config settings or whitelist my home IP or something?

My machine is Windows 7 with Cisco VPN client. And our servers are Windows 2003. I work in a small company, so there is little bureaucracy and IT staff.

windows vpn windows-server-2003

5 Answers

  1. Presumably you can access your Production servers from work, when you're in the office.

    In which case, you need to configure your VPN connection and access rights so that, when you're VPNed from home to your office, you can reach your production environment via your office network.

    Quite how you achieve this is down to your network topology, choice of VPNs and firewalls, IP ranges and route configuration. Are you in charge of these things, or is there a network administrator in control of the system?

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  2. Can you just remote desktop into a machine in the office? There's probably some reason you can't, but I figured I'd check just in case.

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  3. You mentioned a Cisco VPN client. Is this because you have a Cisco firewall? I sound like a broken record, but the ASA5505 is an economical way to set up a tunnel to your office from home.

    You can also use something like LogMeIn.

    I'd be surprised if you have to spell this out for your "sys admin". It should be enough for you to explain what you need access to.

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  4. With the Windows VPN client you can configure connections so they won't send all your traffic down the one link and you can connect to multiple VPN servers simultaneously.

    It is pretty easy to setup a VPN server in 2003 (Routing and Remote Access is what your admin is looking for), just don't load it on a DC.

    You would need one in each environment, they don't add a huge amount of load per user, but there are a few things that need to be setup.

    Pros: no additional licensing, no new hardware Cons: you do need someone to setup the servers, firewalls and make sure the user accounts are configured correctly, additionally, DNS and IP ranges can cause issues in setup.

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  5. Your question is not quite clear on how are you accessing production systems. If you need VPN for both, and RDP is out of the question, than you can run two VM's - one with vpn to work, one with VPN to production. However, the performance of this might be worse than with RDP, depends on what kind of machine you have and what kind of network connection.

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