[TriLUG] VPN (router) recommendation

[Matt Pusateri]

On Apr 19, 2013, at 1:02 AM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:23:38 -0400
> Matt Flyer <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:
> 
>> Good Evening Trilug,
>> 
>> I am looking for a recommendation for a router, specifically for the 
>> purpose of providing VPN access for one to six users.  I would like
>> to find something in stock locally (tomorrow), at a price point of
>> about ~$200 or less.  It will be used to connect to a VLAN with DHCP,
>> mostly via Window's clients because of dependency on IE. Ideally,
>> users will be able to authenticate to the Windows domain, though I am
>> not sure off hand how this would work.
>> 
>> Any suggestions or recommendations would be really appreciated.
> 
> Here's how you can get it tonight for zero dollars...
> 
> 1) Grab an ancient computer from your garage. I'd say a Pentium III
>   with 512MB and a 2GB drive would probably be good enough.
> 2) Cannibalize a second wired NIC from an even older computer.
> 3) Download OpenBSD and install it on the old computer, CLI only.
> 4) Make it into a PF firewall. See this:
> 
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/pf/
> 
> For lighter electrical usage and better use of space, make the old
> computer a laptop and use a USB NIC dongle for the Internet side, with
> the laptop's 100MB for the LAN side. 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> SteveT
> 

Along these same lines pfsense (htttp://www.pfsense.org) would make a good roll your own solution as well.  You could have OpenVPN, PPTP or IPsec VPN's with it.

Matt P.