[TriLUG] Another VPN Question

[Jon Carnes]

Do yourself a favor and buy two Linksys routers (~$80/each). Setup the
routers to vpn each other and then give one to the home droid and set
the other up as a parallel firewall. It will take you 10 minutes to
setup and it's droid proof...

Alternately, just buy one Linksys and then setup IPSec on your company
firewall.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 00:24, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:25:00 -0400, Brian Henning
> <lugmail at cheetah.dynip.com> wrote:
> >   As it happens, today a coworker came to me wanting to be able to access
> > our financial files from home.  Again, VPN to the rescue, or so I thought.
> > OpenVPN sounds really good; only problem is, this coworker only has Windows
> > 98 on his computer at home; OpenVPN calls for 2k/XP.  Are VPN clients and
> > servers interchangeable?  Can I run OpenVPN on the company side (on our
> > linux server) and just find whatever VPN client I can get my hands on that
> > will run on Win98?  If anyone could suggest a VPN client they have
> > experience with that works well on 98 in conjunction with OpenVPN, or any
> > other f/oss solution I can install on the company side's linux box, I'd be
> > eternally grateful.
> 
> Sadly, I don't think this will work.  OpenVPN tunnels everything over a
> a TCP (or was it UDP?) connection on a single port while other VPNs
> like IPSEC or PPTP use a separate IP protocol.
>  
> > This coworker is using dialup, so there's no way to install much in the way
> > of VPN appliance hardware in his home.
> 
> For many years I ran a linux box that acted as a gateway and NAT box for
> a dialup connection, so don't count that out.  If diald is still around, I used
> to use that for on demand dialing.  That way, for the internal
> network, it appeared
> to be always connected (albeit with a long startup time for the first
> connection).
> 
> Alternatively, the linux version of the PPTP server is called, iirc, PoPToP and
> works quite well.  Any security concerns you may have heard about PPTP
> are just in the specific MS implementation of it, not in the protocol itself, so
> that might be an option for you...
> 
> Cheers,
> Tanner