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VPN or Remote Desktop


Rob B
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I am trying educate myself and decide what is best for using Mastercam and other software from my laptop at home. Also for my employees to have access to Mastercam from home. We are using desktop computers at work. I spoke with local computer guy and he says to just use remote desktop. He thinks remote desktop is the better way to go. Just not sure that is best and most secure way to go. Could you give opinions and help educate me the positives and negatives of both options. We are a small job shop. I can give more info if needed.

 

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Something I can contribute!   I use RD to access servers etc from offsite...but that's generally for spot instances.  VPN is my vote for accessing files/network shares from home...install MC at home and grabbing license from the work server etc etc.

I've never tried driving MC remotely using RD however...but i can't imagine it's a great experience.   I know trying to drive Solidworks through a RD window ain't my cup of tea for sure.  There used to be something that prevented RD from working with OpenGL...but take that w a grain of salt bc that could've been remedied years ago for all i know. 

Luckily i've been able to match my home equipment to my work equipment...and that makes gateway-to-gateway VPN setup relatively...uh...painless.

Completely my opinion...VPN works for us...very well...and I'm reasonably certain things are buttoned-up well security-wise.  I would expect with decent hardware (Ubiquity-level stuff) you should be able to easily handle 25+ connections (??).  Remote Desktop is basically on every Windows machine...shouldn't be too hard to at least give it a test drive for what you're trying to do.

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Good points. My MC reseller said they use Sonicwall. Any suggestions their? Also looks like I probably need to research another local IT guy to help with VPN network. I tried to run MC from remote desktop at a company one time. It was not good. Struggled the whole time.

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Don't want to stray too far off the MC path here...but since you asked...

Can't really say anything about Sonicwall - no experience w them...But i've heard good things.  I've also heard they're a little more comprehensive perhaps than you might find at least in some of the older ubiquiti stuff.  I'd go out on a limb and say you likely won't go too far wrong with either...especially if you can match equipment work & remote.  you may want to poke around Lawrence Systems YouTube channel - he's a little vested...but seems like a solid dude with pretty good advice.

One thing I do stay away from...the latest and greatest software updates on ubiquiti stuff...they frequently update...but I've had some issues before and learned not to be quite so eager.  

Probably a good lesson across the board when tech is involved.

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Remote desktop will be 100% dependent on how stable & fast your connection is.  Every mouse movement, click, etc, has to be sent from your computer to the remote one where the mouse is actually moved on screen, and then sent back to you.   I've had plenty of good and bad experiences running this.   Note that there can be license issues if you're using a physical sim and Windows Remote Desktop.  I'd make sure you're using a software license.  If you have a stable internet connection to & from, the benefits are that processing a toolpath/loading a large assembly/etc. are all still done locally on your desktop computer at the office, which is presumably better than the computer you're just using at home for a screen & mouse.  Files will load from a network location as fast as they do at the office, because you're really just interactively "streaming a video" (gross simplification) from the office.  Also, I don't know if 3d mice will play well with this setup.

A VPN is really no different than being on a local network for all practical purposes.  Again, you'll want a software license with a server setup for launching Mastercam et al., but  the data transfer will be very low unless you're loading & saving the files directly to the network.  I've also had good and bad experiences, mostly due to connection bandwidth and network architecture.  The potential upside here is that even with a poor connection, you're relying on your local machine to do all processing/rendering/etc, so as long as you have enough bandwidth to keep a connection to your license server, you're good to run.  The downside is that you'll need comparable hardware to what you have at the office to process toolpaths the same, and transferring large files to & from the network can get tedious.  Especially if your home connection has a poor upload speed as many of them do.

No direct answer here, but hope this helps!

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Thanks for your input Aaron. I will continue to way my options. The main thing I am hear so far is seems if using VPN, both computer need to have similar hardware or I could have problems. Is this what you are saying? I just purchased a high end desktop. The laptop and desktop probably want interact properly.

My laptop is" average" Lenovo Yoga 730. It freezes up (lags) sometimes. My guy in the shop, that is most knowledgeable on computer hardware, hates the laptop. He says it has lots of Lenovo software running in the background. he shuts it off and it starts back after the computer is turned off. Does anyone have any input on this?

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On 11/5/2020 at 9:16 PM, Rob B said:

Thanks for your input Aaron. I will continue to way my options. The main thing I am hear so far is seems if using VPN, both computer need to have similar hardware or I could have problems. Is this what you are saying? I just purchased a high end desktop. The laptop and desktop probably want interact properly.

My laptop is" average" Lenovo Yoga 730. It freezes up (lags) sometimes. My guy in the shop, that is most knowledgeable on computer hardware, hates the laptop. He says it has lots of Lenovo software running in the background. he shuts it off and it starts back after the computer is turned off. Does anyone have any input on this? 

Not saying that you'll have problems, but if you use a VPN, you're 100% relying on the machine you're currently using.  It's no different than having two computers at the shop, one a nice workstation that you've set up to do CAD/CAM all day and a second cheap one that was really only bought to view prints and check email.  If you have to use the second one for CAD/CAM, you're going to be very disappointed in the toolpath processing time and large assembly display.     There's no concerns if you have a good work station at home, and an equally good, but different, work station at the office.  Both of them should give comparable performance, so you'll be fine.

On the Lenovo, if the biggest problem is caused by their programs running in the background, there's an easy way to disable startup things in windows 10:

  • Right click on the task bar and choose "Task Manager" image.png.5f0eb9a38967546891f052fd55e0e41c.png or Ctrl+Alt+Delete and choose Task Manager.
  • In the Task Manager, go to the Startup tab.  From there you can see all of the non-windows-critical things loading with your computer and disable anything that you don't want: image.png.712d2311ba072cce38068d98919e671c.png

 

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