Dave is right, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is going to be the solution.
Much of the traffic flow needed between the workstation and the domain is
going to be blocked by routers on the Internet. The solution is a VPN which
can be though of as a private tunnel through the Internet to the Local Area
Network that the Domain Controller is on. VPN's are generally IPSEC or PPTP.
IPSEC stands for Internet Protocol Security and is the more secure of the
two but generally more difficult to set up. PPTP stand for Point to Point
Tunneling Protocol and would be the best choice for your first attempt as it
is more forgiving although less secure. Now you have to decide on the where
the endpoints of the tunnel will be. If you had a Windows 2000 server and a
Windows 2000 workstation each on the Internet with a public address you
could create a PPTP connection between them and they could communicate
across the Internet privately using any protocol because the real
communication is encapsulated inside generic TCPIP packets which routers on
the Internet will route. But what if you have two offices separated by the
Internet? Would each workstation need to make a PPTP connection to each
server? Thankfully no. One can set up two devices to maintain the tunnel and
traffic between the two networks can be routed through the tunnel. The
workstations and servers at each of the offices are not even aware that the
traffic is being encapsulated and passed through a PPTP tunnel. They are
simply sending traffic to their default gateway and handled by the PPTP
server (also considered a router). There are several options you can choose
from as your PPTP endpoint. Windows NT4, 2000, and 2003 can perform the job
of a PPTP server. Many inexpensive routers today have VPN capability built
in which means that you can set up the routers to maintain a tunnel between
them to pass LAN traffic or you can configure only one router to accept
incoming PPTP connections and let the workstation be the other tunnel
endpoint. This would be an ideal solution if you only have one machine at
the remote office. Of critical importance is that the two machines be on
different IP networks. If the private IP addresses on the home lan are
192.168.0.1 - 192.168.0.5 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, make sure
that the lan at the office is on a different IP subnet, for example
192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.5 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
As far as DNS is concerned, when a workstation makes a PPTP connection it
actually gets another ip address, DNS server, and WINS server from the dhcp
server on the network it connects to. Once you have made a PPTP connection
if you run IPconfig /all you will see that you now have two IP addresses.
One for your Local LAN and one for your Point to Point adapter.
I hope this helps and Good luck!
