Sorry for the long question, but the situation/desire is quite complex. Here is my setup: I have a laptop which I carry around everywhere and I have a desktop sitting at home, connected to the internet through a router using NAT.

My objective is to create a connection from my laptop to my desktop that can allow me to (in order of priority):

1. Use the desktop as a proxy server
2. Access files on the desktop remotely
3. Control said desktop from the laptop using VNC or similar.

Now here is the scene. I have already looked up and tried several ways to achieve the above goals.

1. Teamviewer - I used it and didn't like it. This is not an option.
2. SSH - This seems ideal, I have figured a way to use this for both proxy and file sharing. However, I am currently unable to connect it due to the NAT. I have a separate thread trying to get that to work here.
3. VPN - I've figured out how to use this method for proxy, but not file sharing. However this faces the same problem as the above: I can't get it to connect through the NAT.

Does anyone have any other solutions for what I want? Otherwise, if there are solutions to connecting through the NAT, please tell me (in the other thread).

Thanks