Re: VPN?

On Jan 14, 2005, at 1:38 PM, Remco Barendse wrote:

> Thanks for the tips Russ and Ethan!
>
> I have been using FreeSwan in the past but indeed development has 
> stopped, not the most obvious choice :)

I have been using OpenSwan successfully on RHEL3 for network to network 
tunnels. IE not road-warrior. I did setup a Windows XP laptop 
successfully in a road warrior configuration. It ended up failing when 
at NAT'd locations, and at the time (~1year ago) there were no complete 
solutions to fix this.

> I read good things about OpenVPN but it needs a separate VPN client. 
> If I'm on holiday and I want o use my own phone from an internet cafe 
> it might be a problem as many computers are locked down to prevent 
> installation of stuff.

The laptop configuration went with openvpn. Which worked for awhile, 
but then with SP2 required the client to upgrade to the RC version of 
2.0 because of something SP2 broke. Added a couple lines to the openvpn 
server. It has its flaws but 2.0 seems to have fixed the majority of 
those. As you said, it requires a client setup.

> I wonder what RedHat will be including for RHEL4 as a vpn solution.
> would be nice to have something supported on stock boxes

RHEL3 and I imagine 4 (if it doesn't move to kernel 2.6) have the IPSEC 
stack backported. So the VPN abilities are built in and supported. I 
use the configuration of openswan to create it, mainly because I found 
the docs on using the kernel level ipsec stuff midly confusing. It made 
sense in the tutorials, but in reality I had a harder time getting it 
to work. I imagine they may have better VPN tools to set that up. 
Though the redhat-config-network package, has IPSEC in the setup type 
so you can set stuff up there. Again I didn't have any luck getting 
that to work though.

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