Remote Desktop speed through VPN: Faster/slower???? 1

[TopRung]

Being the newb that I am in many areas, I was surprised to find out that I was able to Remote Desktop (RD) to my servers from home once I established a VPN connection.

My initial thinking was that I had to open the Remote Desktop port(s) on the Firewall at work to allow such connections from the outside world. But, while I was VPN'd in from home, I tried RD and it worked.

So i guess the VPN tunnel is all encompassing (when it is active) and any communications are housed within it. So, this leads me to the following...

Is a standalone RD connection faster than one running from within the VPN tunnel ?????


Thanks!

 

[lgarner]

Yes. It may not be noticeable, but an encrypted connection will always be slower than a comparable non-encrypted one simply due to the overhead of encryption.

 

[TopRung]

thank you Lgarner. Can you quickly explain the differences between the two connections ?

I take it that the RD connec is unencypted and vulnerable?

 

[lgarner]

I believe that the normal Remote Desktop (or Terminal Services) connection is encrypted, but you'd need to verify that with Microsoft. What I meant was that the VPN tunnel adds an additional layer of encryption on top of anything that the application does.