What is/are the best Remote Access/VPN services for my Mac system?

Question

2009 Macbook Pro
2009 Macbook
2010 iMac
2 iPad 2s
2 iPhone 4s
Computers on Snow Leopard
iOS 5
Everything is updated
I want :
1.  to have everything working together, with remote access from anywhere on the internet, file sharing, streaming & transfer.
2.  the security of a VPN connection. 
I will soon update my existing router w/an Airport Extreme.  What VPN/Remote Access client(s) should I get? Is there one solution for both jobs, or do I need to get more than one service?  I have looked at LogMeIn, Witopia.  Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I've been down this road and settled on a much simpler solution...
VPNs are ok... but the performance is bad, they send TCP packets inside TCP packets... which is a bad thing, some connections completely break down. security is o-k, but openVPN is much better yet more complicated to set up. Also you have to go through all the mess of setting up the server.
I tried using VPNs for a while, and then instead settled with tunneling specific connections over ssh... it is more secure and elegant, there is no server setup, however it is not seemless.. you have to set up the connections/ports individually each time, this can get messy if you want access to lots of things at once.
I eventually came accross sshuttle, and this is what i have stuck with because it's just bloody great... it's like a VPN but uses SSH. So you don't have to set up a VPN server... you just need access to an ssh server (i.e your home mac with "remote login" (ssh) enabled, and your router to foward ssh requests to that machine).
not only do you not have to mess around with server configs, but it also give far better performance, stability, and the security of ssh (i.e whichever cypher you want). This is because unlike VPN, sshuttle pulls the TCP packets apart before sending them over SSH (which is allready using TCP) and then re-assembles them the other side with python. the result is comparably better performance and stability than VPN protocols.
you can route individual IPs from the servers subnet, or tell it to automatically find and merge all host names / IPs it can find with your current subnet.
Theory of Operation
sshuttle is not exactly a VPN, and not exactly port forwarding. It's kind of both, and kind of neither.
It's like a VPN, since it can forward every port on an entire network, not just ports you specify. Conveniently, it lets you use the "real" IP addresses of each host rather than faking port numbers on localhost.
On the other hand, the way it works is more like ssh port forwarding than a VPN. Normally, a VPN forwards your data one packet at a time, and doesn't care about individual connections; ie. it's "stateless" with respect to the traffic. sshuttle is the opposite of stateless; it tracks every single connection.
You could compare sshuttle to something like the old Slirp program, which was a userspace TCP/IP implementation that did something similar. But it operated on a packet-by-packet basis on the client side, reassembling the packets on the server side. That worked okay back in the "real live serial port" days, because serial ports had predictable latency and buffering.
But you can't safely just forward TCP packets over a TCP session (like ssh), because TCP's performance depends fundamentally on packet loss; it must experience packet loss in order to know when to slow down! At the same time, the outer TCP session (ssh, in this case) is a reliable transport, which means that what you forward through the tunnel never experiences packet loss. The ssh session itself experiences packet loss, of course, but TCP fixes it up and ssh (and thus you) never know the difference. But neither does your inner TCP session, and extremely screwy performance ensues.
sshuttle assembles the TCP stream locally, multiplexes it statefully over an ssh session, and disassembles it back into packets at the other end. So it never ends up doing TCP-over-TCP. It's just data-over-TCP, which is safe.
Anyway, you can find it on github here https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle
if you uncomfortable using the command line, someone has also bundled it into an app here: https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/commits/dist/macos
IMPORTANT, the latest version invokes a bug in one of apple's drivers after a while which causes a kernel panic, (this isn't the same as the bug where you have to reset your network interface like it says in the readme, this WILL cause a kernel panic) stick with version 0.53 untill ether Apple fixes the bug, or sshuttle stops antagonising it. 0.53 works perfectly at the moment. you can ether install git and clone the specific version or download the 0.53 app here instead:
http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/sshuttle-Download-97917.html
alternatively, if your loging in from linux there aren't any problems with 0.60 because the system would have different dirvers of course.
One last note... you said you wanted everything to work together, one thing that will not work over VPNs, SSH, and sshuttle is bojour... this is significant because things like AFP shares wont pop up automatically, you will have to specify them ... i.e command+k in finder and type AFP://192.168.0.x or VNC://192.168.0.x etc this is because none of these options support multicasting which bonjour requires. This isn't such a big deal so long as you know what services are available on your machine and how to manually connect to them (like i said above)