I've set up SSH tunnels in the past. And have setup Linux routers (simple nat firewall tip stuff), but not both together.
Firewall peircing howto
VPN linux howto
VPN masqeruade howto (talks about PPTP a little bit, which is MS's VPN stuff a little bit, Linux supports it with serious security caveots, though)
Also mentions IP Sec, which is a alternative to SSH tunnels for Linux. And I am sure there are others that I don't know about.
Basicly you can not only do remote logs, but the SSH protocol supports transfering data across it. Like files and X11 and that sort of thing.
So what you do is you setup PPP to run thru SSH and you get a encrypted tunnel thru whatever network your going thru. With PPP you need root access on at least one machine, though and that can be a problem, but with slip you can get around that, I think, but I never used it.
So basicly it becomes just another network interface. Just like any other one, even though it is "virtual" it has full PPP capabilities.
The Linux kernel has full bridge capabilities built in (with the proper compile-time options), and I've used that in the past to setup a wireless bridge (technical term for "wireless access point") for my laptop using a normal Linux distro to connect to my private network and thru that into the internet.
You can setup NAT (masquerade actually, slight difference I think) routing if the 2 networks that are seperate network space, just like most home routers that connect private network address space to the internet.
Using programs like Quagga/Zebra (never used them personally) you can extend the capablities to real router with support for protocols like RIP, OSPF (v2 and v3), route maps and all that fun stuff (even border gateway protocol for being a real internet-capable router if you wanted, but RIP and OSPF is for internal networks).
So using that you can connect 2 major networks together and route traffic back and forth using a encrypted PPP tunnel over the internet via for a WAN link or whatever. (Probably even multiple connections connecting many networks together in a logical star network situation, but that mostly depends on how smart the person setting it up is.)
That's one of the reasons I started using Linux in the first place, it's networking capabilities exceed window's by a tenfold. I got tired of dealing with the crappy proxy stuff and built in connection sharing crap that Windows 98 SE came with, althought I expect that Window's capabilities have increased quite a bit since then.
Full TCP/IP network would be possible as far as I know. And if using PPP it can handle appletalk and IPX/SPX type stuff, but I don't know exactly how well that would work in some situations.
So as long as your OS supports TCP/IP and can be set up to use gateways and such then it should be completely independant of what type of OS you use as a client.
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