I am trying to understand the options for accommodating a "road warrior" who, as a VPN client, needs to connect to one or more machines which reside at the home office, in a LAN protected by a stand-alone firewall. The road warrior is running Debian on a laptop. The firewall protecting the LAN is IPCop2.
After much searching with google and reading a number of documents, it appears to me that there exist two approaches: (1) The firewall can act as the VPN server; this allows the roadwarrior to access the entire protected LAN. (2) The VPN can bypass the firewall; in this case, one machine in the protected LAN acts as the VPN server. Either of these solutions is acceptable. I do not know whether the use of IPCop2 simplifies or complicates the situation; but the user strongly prefers to remain with IPCop2 rather than to switch to another firewall. I am having difficulty trying to reconcile the step-by-step procedures which I have found for implementing VPN on Debian with the the step-by-step procedures which I have found for implementing VPN on IPCop2. I am wondering if the two systems are compatible. RLH
