Once the tunnel and subnet route are up, printing a bill on the office printer from your sofa and opening the Accounts share are the same actions you do at your desk — same addresses, same clicks.
This is the page where the setup starts paying rent. With a mesh VPN connected and the office subnet route approved, your home PC is logically sitting on the office LAN. That means the two everyday office things — shared folders and the network printer — work from home with their ordinary office addresses, no special remote software for each. It also means one safety rule must be understood cold: these services are safe only because the tunnel carries them. They must never be reachable without it.
Nothing about the share changes. At the office you open \\192.168.1.10\Accounts; at home, VPN connected, you open exactly the same path. Sign in with the same Windows username and password the share already expects. If it worked at your desk and fails at home while the tunnel is up, suspect in this order: the subnet route (can you ping the server?), then share permissions, then a home/office address clash — the three causes covered across this series.
For daily use, map the share as a drive letter at home too, but tick reconnect at sign-in only if the VPN starts with Windows. A mapped drive hunting for an unreachable server before the VPN is up is the source of the classic 'my home PC hangs at login' complaint.
For home printing to work through the gateway, the printer needs an office LAN address. Two shapes qualify: a network printer with its own IP (wired or Wi-Fi on the office LAN), or a USB printer shared from an office PC that stays on. In the second shape the sharing PC is part of the chain — if it sleeps or is off, the printer is gone, and no VPN setting can change that.
192.168.1.40Windows file sharing (SMB, port 445) and printer sharing are designed for a trusted local network. Inside your encrypted VPN they are on a trusted network — your own. On the open internet they are attacked constantly and have a long history of serious exploits. So: no port forwarding of 445 or 139, ever, and run the standing test — disconnect the VPN and try the share address from home. It must fail. If it works without the VPN, something in the office router is exposed and needs closing today, not after the festival season.
Honesty about pace: opening documents over the tunnel feels nearly normal, but copying a 500 MB scan folder home will take real minutes, because every byte travels up the office's upload speed and down your home connection. Print jobs are small and feel instant; big design files and database folders do not belong in a copy-over-VPN habit. For heavy files, use Remote Desktop to the office PC and work on the file where it lives — the screen travels, the file stays home.
At the office your PC and the server may already trust each other through saved credentials. At home, Windows sometimes presents a fresh login box for the same share. Enter the server's username in the form SERVERNAME\username with that account's password — the home PC's own password will simply be rejected and look like a fault. Tick 'remember my credentials' only on a PC that is yours alone; on a family PC, type it each time. Small discipline, real protection.
The video demonstrates printing and share access from home, live on the tunnel.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes, if it is shared from an office PC and that PC stays on and awake. The chain is home PC, tunnel, gateway, the sharing PC, then the printer. If the sharing PC sleeps, printing fails even though everything else works. A printer with its own network connection removes that weak link.
Remote Desktop sends only screen changes, which are small. A file copy moves the entire file through the office's upload speed — the slower direction of most connections. Copying a large folder can be ten times slower than doing the same job at your office desk, and that is physics, not a fault.
Inside the tunnel it is as safe as being in the office, provided your home PC itself is clean and locked when you step away. The habit to avoid is leaving the tunnel connected overnight on a shared family computer. Connect for work, disconnect when done.