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I want to set up 5 powerful computers to run Mechanical Engineering software in my home office, and give remote access to my contractors on a daily basis. Which remote access works best for me? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by imp0ster666@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

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I am an independent contractor that contracts out to my interns that are spread around the whole country. I am still a small business that would like to make an efficient and affordable setup. So far, I have figured that for $500 a piece, I can buy pretty good refurbished PC from ebay and set up my software on them. What is the best bang for buck remote access I can deploy to have very smooth remote access system going on? I have read that windows RDP is a free option. Is there a exponentially better paid option that won't break the bank for me? What would you guys recommend?

Another reason I want to do this is that we don't have to deal with file transfer back and forth. I would like to keep the files in these computers. This bring me to my next question. Is it possible to set up a single drive that contains all the files and no matter whichever computer they have remoted in, they would save the files in one central location?

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[–] kaiwulf@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

If self hosting, I'd virtualize the workstations and utilize GPUs designed for virtualized engineering workstations, like a Nvidia A100

As for access, you could go through the trouble and expense of exposing something like VMware Horizon VDI to the internet through a reverse proxy if using virtualized workstations.

A better option would be to go with Cloudflare Zero Trust. You run a small agent on your side, and people outside needing access sign in through Cloudflare, and you can grant very specific access to what they need. It's kind of like a VPN but with much greater control over where someone can go while connected

You'll want to segment the workstations off into their own VLAN, and you should be using a good firewall on its own hardware to lock down access between outside and the workstation VLAN (ie only allow connection from Cloudflare service endpoint urls to IP range of your workstations)