It's been a minute but I have news. Firstly, apologies for the delay. I'm in school and have to give priority to it as this is the whole reason I got back in college. Here's what went down in an easy to digest format:

1. Wiped Windows XP from an old machine and installed FreeBSD 10.1.
2. Configured SSH daemon on FreeBSD machine.
3. Setup port forwarding.

As previously mentioned, I'm making sure I know how to accomplish my goals on my laptop before I apply it all to the bhackpack project. So I went back to square one on the VPN because I was previously running OpenVPN on the XP machine. XP was a problem. So I have the SSH tunnel active now and am able to tunnel select ports. I started with my external router's remote administration port so now remote admin is disabled but I can still access the web GUI internally from the tunnel, and telnet in the same way. Having access to this and being SSH'd into my server at home while at work during downtime should help move this along faster (studies permitting).

Next objectives:

• Establish VPN system-wide on remote machine.
• Apply all necessary configuration to TP-Link pocket router.
• Verify all traffic will route through tunnel.
• Write script to continuously monitor for open access points and connect
• If necessary, agree to terms of service or alert me action is needed.