If I may throw in my two cents, I have
OpenVPN installed at home and at work and I maintain a VPN between my two computers. I can ping and telnet to the PCs in our office using the local IP addresses, knowing that my traffic is encrypted as it travels across the internet.
Also, separate from that and in parallel, I use OpenSSH to open a bash shell on my remote PC, which actually is slightly more versatile because I have X11Forwarding enabled, so I can start graphic applications remotely that then display locally.
