Following the success of AirPrint Hacktivator I am thinking of writing another little Hacktivator application to help with the activation of the OS X dormant VPN capabilities.

Unknown to most users OS X contains all the engines needed to allow iPhones/iPads/iPod Touch to establish a VPN connection with your Mac back home… the only problem is that multiple files have to be created and services started to make it work.  This is essentially what the OS X Server does with those same files via the provided GUI.

As you might guess this GUI is missing from OS X “user” edition.  Here is where VPN Hacktivator will come handy.  It will offer a minimalistic way of activating the dormant capabilities.  I expect the 1st release to be fairly simple.  Just enough to get a VPN connection possible via PPTP to your Mac using an existing Mac user account name.  Future release should be able to add more functionality/options.

What will you be able to do with this VPN connection?  Print to home printers via AirPrint, access home based web servers via mobile safari, ssh into home servers, remote control home machines via VNC/RDP, etc, etc.  I am sure you can come up with other good reasons to use this thing.

Once the VPN is up and running the only thing left to do will be to configure your home router to allow the VPN connection to your Mac… this is going to be the hardest part as VPN Hacktivator won’t be there to automate the configuration.

I will keep you posted on the progress with the application.