Infrastructure Software

Hi all,

I have a V20z running Solaris 10 at home, and I would like to set it up as a VPN server. The Solaris 10 is behind a router with a reserved private IP assigned by DHCP and port forwarding set up for only SSH at the moment. The router has a static external IP.

I'm not exactly sure what the terms are for what I'm trying to do, but this is basically it:
When I am out of town or overseas, I want to be able to connect from my laptop running OS X or Linux to my Solaris 10 server at home, and have the S10 server act as a proxy(?) (gateway?) for all the traffic from my laptop; for example, if I was in a place where nytimes.com was blocked and wanted to be able to browse from my laptop by having the Solaris 10 server proxy (transparently) my requests and forward the responses back to me. I hope I'm explaining this ok...

I have searched a lot online for how to do this, and I have found a lot of info, but nothing that really ties it all together. I'm pretty comfortable working in the shell and doing config stuff, but it would be a huge help if anyone could explain all the pieces I need to snap together to get this working.

These are my questions:
1. What is what I have described called? Just "VPN" or "VPN router," or "VPN gateway"?

2. What software do I need on my Solaris 10 server to do this?

A lot of what I read pointed me to OpenVPN, but I am not clear if OpenVPN alone would enable me to use the public web via the VPN.
If not, then what would I need to have on the server to enable incoming requests over the VPN connection to be rerouted to the public internet?

3. I'm sure I can figure this out if I can just get the server VPN working, but if anyone happens to know, I'd appreciate it:
Built into OS X Networking Prefs I have the ability to add a VPN interface of either of these 2 types:
"PPTP"
"L2TP over IPsec"
From what I have read so far, it seems like IPsec is likely the only reasonable choice, but the option of "L2TP over IPsec" confuses me since I haven't read that they are required to be used together.
Will this option work for connecting to my Solaris VPN server or will I need a 3rd-party app?

Any guidance would be a tremendous help.

Thanks guys!
Jamie