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Low Cost VPN Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the your-net-over-the-internet dept.

whschwartz asks: "I'm looking for a low cost solution for allowing myself and a few others the ability to share a server at one of our locations. One thought was using SSH tunnels to establish secure connections, forwarding any ports needed by our apps. We'd want to be able to map network drives, control the server with something like PC Anywhere or VNC with the possibility of running apps that have remote data on the server. I use the Cisco VPN solution for work, but that's not in our price range and is probably overkill. Are there any other options I should be looking at other than using SSH port forwarding?"

4 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. OpenVPN by LiENUS · · Score: 5, Informative

    Theres always http://openvpn.sourceforge.net/ which has clients and servers for windows, or you could always tunnel pppd over ssh, http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/VPN-HOWTO/ for details

    1. Re:OpenVPN by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Informative

      since that's packing a TCP stream inside another TCP stream and can screw up the packet counters

      I knew this comment would lurk here somewhere, it always does.

      There's a theoretical problem with TCP in TCP on connections with errors. That said, I've built network appliances that do TCP over TCP. From a practical perspective it works just fine, and I've sent terabytes of data over such a link and the throughput approaches the line speed.

      Somebody's firewall is going to kill your connection long before other problems kick in.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  2. Smoothwall by Computerguy5 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could use a smoothwall router. Only cost is standard hardware.

  3. windows xp vpn server by uits · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seems you are trying to connect to a windows machine, and you are using windows clients. Since we can assume it's not Server 2000/2003 (otherwise why would you be asking...) the following link shows how to set up a VPN server on windows xp.

    http://www.onecomputerguy.com/networking/xp_vpn_se rver.htm

    Might not be the coolest way...but it's simple & low cost, using the hardware/software you have already.