Not sure if I am out of touch or not, but I wanted to share. I recently needed to connect two Amazon EC2 instances that were in different VPCs and thus could not directly talk to each other. I needed a VPN between the two systems. One of the systems (the client for the VPN) runs Windows Server, and the other (server for the VPN) runs Linux. In addition, I needed to tunnel UDP through this connection which is something I could not get setup with just SSH. SSH can easily tunnel UDP using netcat and mkfifo, but mkfifo for Windows does not work properly from any of the Windows-Unix configurations I tried (GnuWin32, Cygwin, GOW).
SO ... OpenVPN? Well it is not my go-to here, just because it is, to me, complicated to setup. I checked around for alternatives. I ran into the SoftEther VPN project at Tsukuba University in Japan. www.softether.org I will not describe it in detail. Just that it meets all of my needs and is at least partially open source. Cross platform, easy to setup and manage, and free. Lots of additional options. The client installer can act on Windows as a typical run-when-you-need-it client, or can install itself as a service to run on system start so that your VPN on the client is always up. Maybe all of you VAGUERs already knew about this, but I did not. And I am impressed. Nick Floersch This communication, including any attachments, is solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.
