I'm working at the moment for a company that use an OS (and spyware) Windows 10 and because of some world wide events I started like everybody else to work remotely and connect to my desk machine remotely via VPN.

To achieve this the IT department recommended the use of something of a VPN client.

The problem is that because I use a flavour of BSD at home I've to think on how to use that VPN thing that only works on Winx86 to make the VPN while keeping myself far from Windows.

My solution was to create a Virtual Machine to put all the required VPN software there and setup a SSH tunnel to access my work machine through the VM-VPN and use my OS to work or RDP as needed.

Here some instructions:

  • Install Windows 10 spyware in a virtual machine it will require 16 GB of disk space but if you run the Win10 Debloater you can make it almost usable.

  • Install OpenSSH Server (yes they try to be cool now).

  • Make sure you start the OpenSSH service.

  • Open a CMD screen inside the VM and run:

  ssh -fNTC -L *:20000:<machine-to-rdp-to>:3389 <local-ssh-user>@localhost

  • This <local-ssh-user>@localhost should point to the local Windows account user.

  • The tunnel definition -L *:20000:<machine-to-rdp-to>:3389 means that the traffic will be tunneled from the remote RDP port 3389 to a local port that I choose at random 20000.

    The * means that everybody can connect, if you are running inside a NAT protected virtual machine (like myself) this should be fine. If you want to do this in a machine in the cloud you will restrict that to your own IP address.

  • Last thing is to forward the port 20000 to the Host OS:

Now I just need to connect via RDP using this URL:

127.0.0.1:20000