VPN newbie question

[AndrewTait]

Whilst I know the principles of VPN's, I have a query.

Myself and a friend are working together on a project for a customer. We both work from home, as we are freelance. We each have LAN's and Broadband connectivity to the internet, via routers.

What is the best VPN solution for us so that he can access machines on my LAN from any of his machines and I can access machines on his LAN from any of my machines?

At present, we do not know how much of this we will have to do, as it is a new venture we are working on, and therefore do not want to invest too much money in this if we can avoid it, at least for the moment.

We are both located in the UK.

Thanks in advance.

Andy

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy (Monty Python's The Life of Brian)

 

[pmf71]

best thing to do is to place two identical modem/routers on your internet connections, with built in gateway to gateway IPSec tunneling solution. IPSec is better for gateway to gateway tunneling because there is no need for "dial-up" like PPTP because with IPSec the packets are encrypted on-the-fly without the need for authentication.

Extra info: with gateway to gateway tunneling, two subnets are actually routed to eachother through the tunnel (the tunnel itself uses two separate subnets which are not visible to the normal subnets), which means you can access any machine on either side from any machine, providing you have set proper firewall permissions. But you MUST configure different subnets for each site, for example 192.168.1.0/24 on one site and 192.168.2.0/24 on the other site.

 

[pmf71]

PS i have such a tunnel established between my network and the network of a friend of mine...it is really great, it's as if his machines are on the same network as mine, just slower

 

[mobajwa]

Sounds interesting .Anyone know of a good tutorial for this stuff ?

-
mobajwa

 

[pmf71]

Best thing to do is JUST DO IT. Learn as you try. I did it that way, and has gotten me a pretty long way. VPN is not very hard to learn, But basic knowledge of TCP/IP and routing is necessary to be able to understand the fundamentals of VPN.

 

[mobajwa]

thanx for the advice.... i now have a vpn set up on server 2003 and can log on to the VPN from any pc from the same network !
Now i want to test the vpn and have someone log in from outside thr network.. what ports do i need to forward to the server from the router ???

-
mobajwa

 

[pmf71]

That depends on which type of vpn u want to use. for PPTP, TCP port 1723 should be sufficient.

And make sure the tunnels have encryption!

 

[pmf71]

By the way, the vpn server you set up is OK for client to gateway tunneling, but for gateway to gateway tunneling, you will need a different solution.