Virtual Private Networks (aka Pain)
November 9, 2005 – 9:41 pmA bit incognito lately. A co-worker is out of town for awhile so I’ve been even more incredibly, not to mention some other items.
Anyway — VPN’s, specifically gateway to gateway. There is some serious hardware out there for these solutions. I hear that Nortel makes a good product, however we don’t need that type of quality/cost so we purchased a Netgear. After some fiddling around with this this morning, putting it behind another router, etc, I’ve got it working. Now all I need to do it is get the whole pre-shared scheme working with another Engineer tomorrow. How not enjoyable, but a learning experience none the less.
So how does one mimick this hardware if you only have one computer? I would love to setup an offsite server to act as a gateway and don’t have the ability to muck around with hardware (nor does it necessarily even make sense in this case). Is a software linux VPN gateway possible? Does this even make sense to say? I think that is does.
The ipsec IPsec protocol is used by the VPN’s, link definitely has the support for this. In reasearching the possibilities I came across “Linux FreeS/WAN” . From the site:
Linux FreeS/WAN is an implementation of IPSEC & IKE for Linux.
IPSEC is Internet Protocol SECurity. It uses strong cryptography to provide both authentication and encryption services. Authentication ensures that packets are from the right sender and have not been altered in transit. Encryption prevents unauthorised reading of packet contents.
Unfortunatly they only have experimental support for 2.6 kernels so that could make things a little bit hairy to say the least. I wonder how long this would take me to get up to speed and installed? I will probably have to do this before 1/1/2oo6, so let’s hope there aren’t any hangups.
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