On the topic of the "work machine on home LAN".
You can do this, but the secret is NOT NOT NOT to change any network
settings on the work machine if you can help it. If you browse the
archives you will see lots of posts from people who have brought the
work laptop home, physically connected it to the home LAN, *joined it
to the home LAN's workgroup* and now can't connect at work.
The reason is that changing the network settings to connect to the
home LAN disconnects the machine from the work Domain. When you then
try to connect to the work LAN, you would have to a) remove the
machine account from the work Domain, and b) then rejoin the laptop to
the work Domain. If you don't have this access, you will have to ask
the people who do, and in general, they will not be too pleased.
The secret is to physically connect your laptop to the home LAN, then
login as if you were connecting *at work* to the work LAN. This will
work, using cached credentials. Then you access all resources on the
home LAN by prefixing your requests with the home LAN name of the
resource and using home LAN credentials.
Say you have a shared drive on "wifescomp" called "accounts". Then
from the laptop you refer to the share as "\\wifescomp\accounts". You
will need an already created account on "wifescomp", say "dave" with a
password that you know. When you try to access the "accounts" share
you will be prompted for a user/password. The trick is to specify the
user as "wifescomp\dave".
It may sound complicated, but it's not really. Just think of it as a)
pretending to be on the work LAN, b) consequently having to make
network requests which explicitly say that you are on the home LAN.
If you don't have any name resolution on the home LAN, you can safely
add the home machines to the "hosts" file on the laptop - unless the
work people do something tricky with the "hosts" file! You may have to
check with them.
Cheers,
Cliff