Paul: (hopefully your specific paragraph is properly placed below).
Interoperability in the VPN space is a bit of a misnomer still. It's still a bit
of the wild wild west with each vendor doing their own thing. The security
standards are open and published but which one in use is up to each vendor.
One of the larger questions is the clients you must support. If it's all Windows
you have many choices. VPN is built into CheckPoint and I think Raptor as well.
I personally do not recommend putting the function on your firewall. Nortel has a
nice offering but I don't know if they have a Linux client. AT+T has an offering
where they take care of the whole thing, again I don't know about Linux clients.
I use Aventail. I know they're working on a Linux client but I haven't seen it
yet.
The Linux based commercial solutions sound great to me but you're correct that
they will require a bit more setup (That is they are not a purchased, turn key
solution). They appeal strongly to me because they will have Linux clients.
One final thought. You said you were going site to site and not site to
workstation. In that case you will want a VPN server on each end that will talk
to each other. This can be done seamlessly to the user but allow secure data
transport over the net.
GGK
> Well, the commercial offerings, though perhaps more costly up front, will save
> you a tremendous amount of time. They've already done all the
> interoperability testing to ensure that their product works with all the
> systems that you need it to work with. That alone is a significant time sink,
> and may well be time you don't have. Additionally, if something doesn't work
> as advertised, these companies usually have Engineers that are available to
> come on site and work things through with you so you don't sit there spinning
> your wheels.
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