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?
Pfsense for a free firewall/vpn. Have 3 ports on it (WAN,LAN,VPN Network). Buy a cheap (1gb link speed) switch to facilitate multiple computers, and plug the remote access computers to the vpn network.
This keeps them off of your internal home network from a threat perspective. And can be had for about $100-250 for the setup. Beyond that, you can proceed with whatever design you want, and leverage RDP access.
Many others have better solutions, but this is another way to go about it.