Today, my wife (at home) has called me (at work) because she could not launch chrome anymore. The disk was full. The files /var/log/kern.log and syslog were eating gigabytes. I was able to solve her problem remotely. I have also installed ubuntu on the computer of my old father who lives far. Regularly, I upload pictures (he is my backup for pictuers) and put a shortcut on his desktop.
Only I've been using sshuttle to make ad-hoc tunnels and it's exceedingly easy - there's details at http://alicious.com/digitalocean-free-credit/ (if you'll forgive the rather mercenary promotional slant in that post).
In short "$ sshuttle --dns -r root@X.X.X.X 0/0 --exclude 192.168.0.0/9 # start sshuttle" tunnels everything but my local network over a server with SSH on it [I've not checked for myself with Wireshark yet, do your due diligence].
When setting up I found [Open]VPN a bit protracted in comparison.
VPN and SSH are only partially overlapping in their features. Are you suggesting that SSH only allows local connections, and your VPN is what allows you local network access?
