VPN amateur here. Before I began using a VPN service, I was able to remotely access my home computer and network using a VPN by setting up a VPN Serving on my Windows Machine.
My question is can I still do this with PIA running? From what I understand, PIA basically changes my public IP, which then leads me to conclude that this is not possible, since I need to create a connection from my phone to computer using that public IP.
You’re not going to be able to run the same PC dual-homed across two VPN’s, at least not without two NIC cards (and even then I’m getting a headache thinking about it).
The simplest (and not the most secure) method is to open a hole in your router firewall / port forwarding for RDP to the home computer. This way you connect to your router’s public IP address (from your ISP), then it forwards the RDP port / connection to the internal IP address of the home computer you want to control.
A better variation on this method, IMO (and something I do) is to create a linux VM running SSH, and expose that to the internet (port forward from the router to the linux VM). Then you can tunnel RDP over SSH.
I’m not familiar with getting the windows RDP client to do this (I have an excellent RDP program on my Macbook that supports SSH/RDP tunneling out of the box), but you could always use PuTTy (running on the PC outside of the network) that would create the SSH tunnel. PuTTy would be configured to receive connections on localhost:XYZ (Where xyz is default RDP port). You would then just RPD to localhost:xyz, It would then tunnel the connection over SSH for you.
Here’s a guide for PuTTy and SSH for Windows-based RDP.
http://klinkner.net/~srk/techTips/ssh-remote/
Edit - I should also add, that if you’re familiar with Linux, there’s a great package that allows RDP and SSH sessions over HTML5. So basically you just hit a webpage, log in, and then you have your RDP session right there in your browser. It requires some configuration of course and is missing some nicer features (copy/paste is text only, and done via another portion of the website you log into), but it’s very handy if you need to RDP or SSH from say an iPad or a kiosk terminal. The package is called guacamole - http://guac-dev.org/
Couldn’t you use teamviewer? I still use it to remotely access my pc at home from my laptop or phone even when my VPN is turned on.
I use TeamViewer which works great even through VPN. But yeah, running two VPN’s at the same time may cause issues.
You may be able to do this, but without testing I can’t say for sure.
PIA creates a virtual network adapter, and configures up your routing table to send all traffic destined for the internets out that virt adapter.
You should still be able to open a hole in your router/fw and forward whatever port your VPN server is listening on to the real IP held by the NIC on that computer.
So you now have internet destined traffic originated from the computer heading out the virtual adapter and onto a PIA VPN server and clients making VPN connections directly to the real IP on the computers NIC.
Honestly it sounds like a bad idea. I’d look into getting moving the VPN server service to another networked device like your router or a VM. I use a wndr3700 and ww-drt.
Thanks for the quick reply. I’m headed off on a business trip this week but I am going to see what I can do when I get back