Silicon Valley Lines was featured in two presentations on Remote Operations.
Saturday, September 26th at 9:00am PDT, John Abatecola from TSG multimedia released a new segment in his Model Railroading 101 series covering remote operations at Silicon Valley Lines. This video gives you some insight into how we adjusted our operations scheme to accommodate remote operators while maintaining social distancing rules at the club. We show and explain the technology we’re using to pull this all together, as well as give a glimpse into what a remote ops session looks like.
The same day (September 26th), at 3:00pm PDT, Bernhard and Dave gave a NMRAx presentation about”Remote Operations at Silicon Valley Lines”. This presentation goes deeper into the background and the technology of remote operations. We explain hardware and software setup in detail, and talk about our experience in fine-tuning operations with remote operators.
Silicon Valley Lines 
Excellent stuff. Will there be more info on the OpenVPN setup and use, and why it is needed?
Thanks!
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Hi Chris,
yes, we’ll have another article here going into more details about the system integration aspects.
Technically, a simple tcp port-forward on your router to the layout computer is sufficient. However, that opens up access to JMRI on your computer to anyone on the Internet. The VPN lets us control who gets that access and we can easily revoke it, if necessary.
It doesn’t really matter which VPN software is used. Whatever your router supports (IPSEC, PPTP, OpenVPN, …) should be sufficient for our purposes. I personally like OpenVPN for its wide platform support with the OpenVPN Connect client and ease of use for users.
Hope that helps.
Bernhard
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