I sometimes work at home from a VPN Internet connection. I also have a small home network of about 4 computers of various types. All of them route through my BSD box to the Internet. However, like most people I travel back and forth to the office each day. Sometimes, when I'm working, I don't want to stop what I'm working on remotely just because its time to leave.
I use ssh from my BSD desktop to connect to the computers I work on. They are all remotely hosted and I have never actually seen any of the boxes. Usually, I am editing files using vi(1), managing asterisk servers from the console or setting up opensips processes.
My biggest problem working remote is not the lack of speed, highspeed internet really solved that, not like in the old days when I first started doing this. I remember dealing with that - push a key, go eat lunch, no real problem. But when working remote, the biggest problem is getting disconnected. Its really frustrating when I am in the middle of a project and the VPN gets disconnected or the WiFi just loses signal because someone turns on the microwave and I lose all my work. vi(1) can sometimes be forgiving, but it's far from the ideal method. I can usually recover part of my work.
Back when dialup was the only option, I would often get disconnected and log back in and the program I was working on was still running. Using w(1), I could see that the server still thought that I was logged in and hadn't terminated the program.
I was still working from dialup back when a friend of mine introduced me to screen(1). He ranted and raved about how wonderful screen(1) was and how the world needed to know about it. I've been using it ever since.
