I would like to access my home computer remotely (from work). The problem is that I have a wireless ISP (that's right, wireless) called Broadband Central that puts all their customers in a LAN with NAT. I asked them if they could do port forwarding or anything like that, and they said no. They said the only thing I can use is a VPN that uses IPSec and is NAT traversal. They recommended gotomypc.com, but I don't feel like paying $20/month just to access my computer.

Please understand, that I don't know the first thing about VPNs. Here in the forums I heard mention of some different Open Source VPN options (OpenVPN, FreeS/Wan, and Poptop). So, I have two questions:

1) Will I be able to use them without having to mess with the firewall/network rules, because the ISP is in charge of that, and they're not changing anything.

2) how hard is it to set a VPN up, and which of the aforementioned options is the easiest to install and configure (or at least, most clearly documented).

Also, any links to howtos or other helpful references would be appreciated. Thanks.

can no one point me in the right direction for installing VPN's?

If you're behind a NAT you will struggle with IPSec unless it is using traversal.

Probably the simplest is to install PPTP from poptop. And if you don't want encryption (just encapsulation) then you don't even need to recompile your kernel. Give PPTP a go first - if you want encryption I think you have to compile in support for MPPE.

http://www.poptop.org/

Your firewall fules needs to accommodate protocol 47 (not port 47) and tcp port 1723. You should be able to get a package for your distro, try rpm.pbone.net.

Regards,
Chris