[Novices] quick question about vpn firewall recommendations

[Greg Mason]

> OK, so you want to walk into Panera Bread, fire up your wifi, and have
> your wireless traffic encrypted, even though the traffic through the
> Internet is not encrypted?  Right?
yes.
>
> To do this, you want to have an encrypted tunnel from your laptop to
> your home (?) and bounce everything off your home network to the
> Internet?  You realize that if the wifi network is faster than your  
> home
> network, then you are slowing yourself down?  AND (more important),  
> you
> are limiting your wifi download speed to the UPLOAD speed of your home
> network?  Since many home networks have a much faster download speed
> than upload speed, this could be a potentially huge downside.

yes, I realize this.

> I don't think you want to use SSH for this.  OpenVPN is a good option,
> and typically very easy to get working using pre-shared keys.

I've got OpenVPN sort-of working. It connects, but traffic won't go  
over the tunnel. Only thing I can maybe think it is, is that it's a  
client-side configuration problem? I'm using Tunnelblick for OS X,  
and the configuration file generated by the OpenVPN plugin for IPCop.
>
> You also might want to look at TOR (the onion router project),  
> presented
> a couple times at KLUG (DVD from another LUG).  This will encrypt your
> traffic out of your PC, AND let you browse the Internet completely
> anonymously (they can't even tell you're at Panera Bread, or even  
> in MI)
> And no home [or other] network to VPN into is required.

hrm.. might try this...

-Greg