Advice on setting up a network please?

I want to network my computers at home to the computer in my office on the other side of town, so I can share and access the files between them. They are on different broadband ISPs and both use a wireless router.

I've looked up the networking section on Vista but it's too complicated. I think I need to be setting up a VPN network but I don't really know what this means, and it asks for IP addresses and other stuff I don't understand.

If it's possible for me to do this, and you can explain how in clear and non technical language, it would be much appreciated.

Cheers!

I don't have a network administrator I'm self employed.

At previous answerer: come on the guy's asking for help for his own office! He doesn't have a Network Admin...

Ok - now to answer the question, you would need two devices to setup the VPN tunnel. What is a VPN? Virtual Private Network means you can have your own private network over a publicly shared medium, like the Internet. No one will be able to intercept your data in the tunnel. Virtually, it's a tunnel, in reality, it's just two devices at the edge of your network encrypting all traffic that they send to each other.

I'm not sure what types of devices you have at the edge of your network (you mentioned you have a wireless router, which I don't think would do a site-to-site VPN). You would probably need two firewalls sitting at the edge - something like a Fortigate firewall or similar to that. I saw some Linksys firewalls at Bestbuy that did site-to-site VPN's as well.

Other than that, you can have two servers at the edge performing as the VPN termination points. I think the firewalls would be more cost effective.

One other thing to note is that you would most likely need static IPs on your Internet connection so you can specify on each firewall what address the other end has. Your Internet provider should be able to answer the questions regarding giving you static IPs.

Once you have all your ducks in a row, you can setup the devices from the manual or probably a wizard they have to walk you through setting up a VPN.

I hope this has been informative.

Yes, you will need to set up a VPN. You'll need to talk to your network administrator to get this set up (because your office will most likely need to change their settings, too).

Since your not a technical person you may want to go with a software solution, but at a price of course. Look at
https://www.gotomypc.com and see if it will meet your budget and functionality.

There is also a program called PCanywhere you may want to entertain as well.

Good luck.