Sometimes you would like to connect to your home machine from work or while traveling. Making your home machine a virtual private network (VPN) server is a secure way to accomplish this. While you have an established VPN session with your home machine, you can access files from its hard drive or other machines on the network that have file sharing enabled.

Preparing your home machine to accept VPN connections is fairly straightforward. Click Start Settings > Control Panel > Network and Internet Connections > Network Connections > Create a new connection. This will launch the New Connection Wizard. While advancing through this wizard, the options you want to enable are "Set up an advanced connection," "Accept Incoming Connections," and "Allow virtual private connections." The sixth screen of the wizard allows you to specify the users that can use the VPN; make sure you enable at least one account. After the wizard is complete, nothing further needs to be done; the VPN is ready to accept incoming connections. You can test this by using a VPN client to connect to the IP address of the VPN server machine.