(hope this is not too far off topic, if so, please advise)
I have a pretty beefy home PC that mostly just sits idle right now and runs BOINC while I am not using it
I have a friend who is a freelance video editor who is juggling some large projects and in need of more compute resources. They are using standard Windows software like Adobe After Effects, Topaz Labs AI tools, etc…
I am wondering if maybe there is some easy and safe way for me to make my PC available for them to use remotely from their office? Networking, multi-user system management, and remote access are pretty far outside of my expertise, especially in a Windows environment, so I am not sure where to even start in researching if something like this might be feasible. Thoughts?
guess I should mention that I want to make sure the computers GPU’s are made available easily as well, not sure if that makes it any more difficult. Will check some of these out, thanks, I also saw this thing here, not sure if anyone has used it or how it compares?
You probably don’t want to share your operating system and the resources you have on your hard drive?
Virtualization. VirtualBox is enough to run the operating system you provide.
You will install VNC on this system so your friend can connect. You just need to have a public IP and share the port. Everything can be wrapped in a VPN or not.
There are also options to deal with when you don’t have port forwarding.
Frankly idk if VNC will be enough performance for Adobe and other creative tools. Also if he is getting into creating VM’s then he will need to pass through the GPU + Adobe generally will refuse to run on VM’s or have poor performance from my understanding.
actually I was kinda hoping to just use the OS’s default multi-user management, is it too much to assume that Windows will not let other users see each other home dirs?
the friend in question will definitely need a fair amount of disk space locally to store the video files for editing, etc… I have some large SSD’s already onboard that are mostly sitting empty which would be fine for that
Hmm, you’re right, there may be a bit of lag, but ultimately you’d have to do a test and assess 100% what it feels like.
Gaming solutions will probably be much better here, but the OP will rather want to separate the host os and not share private stuff. So we’re talking about virtualization and gpu passthrough if it’s supposed to “work”.
ML probably does not have such a deep separation to share host os with someone without the risk of entering private?
also regarding security, I am really more worried about the PC in question having access to the network via whatever remote client is being used.
for some reason, it seems like “secure connections” are something you need to pay a lot of money extra for with Parsec (??)
not sure what the security paradigm is like on Moonlight and similar? Mostly worried about having some software running on the PC that would things like the infamous Lastpass/Plex hacking to occur, etc…
I dont actually have much personal stuff on the PC itself, mostly just my Steam login on my personal account and web browser + password manager, which I am assuming would be inaccessible to a remote user on a different account (right?). However the local network also contains my personal data servers and similar devices
In theory, many things in Windows should work as planned… in practice, I would not give a guarantee, especially when it comes to my private stuff shared with someone somewhere.
The problem will be responsiveness when editing video remotely, it’s hard for me to judge if it won’t be too lag for someone.
Personally, if I had to decide for myself, I would not share my host os with anyone, only virtualization. But it also generates some problems like gpu passthrough.
