On Aug 16, 2004, at 12:21 PM, Brian wrote: > Does anyone know of a consumer grade(Cheap!) router that will allow me > to make a vpn connection to my home from other locations?
There's a linux project to do this called FreeS/WAN. If you can round up an old 486 machine, all the software is then free. Check out www.freeswan.org and www.jacco2.dds.nl/networking/freeswan-panther.html. > It seems that most everything that has "VPN Pass Through" is for > outbound connections. Meaning from my home to my office. I want the > reverse of this, from my office to my home. > Is anyone successfully getting from their office to their home > networks with vpn? What is your set up, if so? > > I have read, very little, about SSH. Is this similar to VPN? And if I > understand correctly it is accomplished through the Terminal, correct? There are two different encryption standards here: IPSEC and SSH. IPSEC is the one that's usually used for VPN, and SSH can really be used for just about anything. You talk of setting up a VPN, but you don't say what services you want to transfer between the networks. I don't have a VPN between my office and home, but I can still do file sharing, printing and other services securely in both directions via SSH tunneling. All the software you need to do so is already there with Mac OS X. There are at least two annoyances with doing this over a cable connection. First, the connection is not symmetrical; the downstream speed is LOTS faster than the upstream speed. Depending on what you want to do, this can get really bothersome. More minor is the fact that the IP address on the cable end is not fixed. It doesn't change very often, but you can get around even that by using a DynDNS service (www.dyndns.org is free) and suitable software to readjust the DNS entry whenever the IP address changes. Some of the cable/DSL routers (e.g., NetGear) even have the DynDNS software built in. I use software on my Linux machine to keep the DNS name up to date. The www.dyndns.org Web site has a list of software, several of which work on Mac OS X. This way lml.homedns.org always points to my house, no matter what games Insight plays with the IP address. The last time the IP number changed was when the power went out for four days a few weeks ago. This exceeded the lease time on the DHCP, so a new IP was allocated when the power came on. I didn't even notice that the number changed until a couple of days ago because the DynDNS took care of addressing everything. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
