A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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At the risk writing an unpopular opinion, circumventing your company IT and security policies is probably not a great idea .
If you can't tolerate using what's provided, use feedback mechanisms and try to improve UX, otherwise change jobs. You're putting yourself and your company at risk by hacking around the "approved" remote access solution.
you're gonna need to just use a KVM. If the company has policies on RDP and VNC, and you're attempting to breach those, you're opening a door for issues under the tech policies you likely signed or agreed to when you started.
I'll be the first to tell you, as someone in cybersec, that while we aren't exactly always proactively looking to bust up employees about conduct, when its clear someone repeatedly attempts bypass, we eventually send it off to managers for review. Some of them wind up in worse situations, with confidential management-lead investigations into them, email interception, desktop monitoring, etc... It's a lot of bullshit for a workaround...
I was about to recommend you piKVM but it seems like you know about it already. I actually do the same with my work pc, but there's one problem, I can't take video calls with pikvm (or can I, do I miss anything in the document?)
I used to use teamviewer for this. But considering it's locked to a VPN, Teamviewer would probably route through the VPN and cause latency, unless standard traffic is still flowing through your own gateway instead of the VPN. a pikvm is probably the best option. More private, better connection quality, and it would be difficult for the company to detect.
In regards to the VPN of its pushing all traffic over the VPN you can add your own routes to keep some traffic local.
I would take ColorodoPhotog's advice. On the other hand, my workplace allows us to use the corporate image on VMs, so I just created a VM on Proxmox and I use the VNC feature to access it. The VNC server is not hosted on the VM itself, so nobody can know it is happening. It is a little slower than I would like, though.