About this interactive
Dial-in once meant a bank of modems; the internet made remote access faster and cheaper, but its traffic crosses public lines, so it has to be secured.
The methods in the lesson:
- VPN (virtual private network): traffic is encrypted at one end and decrypted at the other, which forms a tunnel. The remote device, or a whole branch office with a site-to-site VPN, acts as if it were on the company network.
- SSH (Secure Shell): an encrypted command line, no graphical interface. For Linux servers, switches and routers, anything you would program by commands anyway. Secure file copies ride on it too: SCP, and SFTP, the SSH File Transfer Protocol. (The video calls FTPS and SFTP two ways of securing FTP. FTPS is FTP with TLS added; SFTP is a different protocol that runs over SSH.)
- Remote desktop: a graphical desktop on another machine. VNC works across many systems; RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is built into Windows. (The video calls RDP "virtual desktop connections".) RDP encrypts its sessions; VNC often does not by default, so it is wrapped in SSH or a VPN. A jump box is a machine on the network you remote into and work from, so your own machine reaches only the jump box and the servers are never opened to the outside.
- VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure): a server runs many virtual machines; you remote into one that is already on the network. Your own machine never joins it.
- HTTPS: many services are simply web apps, often in the cloud, reached over an encrypted web connection, such as webmail. No connection into the network at all, which the lesson calls the most popular method of all.
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