Equipment required for Small Office -> Remote worker VPN

[nicr]

We are a small company with a broadband ADSL connection (2MB), operating out of one office. Currently, the Ethernet connection on the ADSL router is connected to a Linksys wireless router. 5 clients connect wirelessly and 2 are wired ethernet in to the ports on the Linksys switch.

We want to be able to access our company network remotely via the Internet and I presume a VPN connection is the way to go.

We are a multi-platform company with Windows PCs, Macs and Linux computers.

What do we need to purchase to get this happening? Something like a Cisco PIX 501 or ? What are our options?

Thanks.

 

[UniqueFD]

Which Linksys model do you have? You may find the router itself will support VPN tunnelling. (I use a Linksys cable/DSL router BEFSX41 - not wireless, though - which supports two VPN tunnels).

 

[nicr]

Hi - we have a Linksys WRT54G.
It has a VPN section in it's config screen, but the only options are related to VPN passthrough. If I understand correctly, that means it is not a VNC server - is this correct?

 

[UniqueFD]

You're right - the WRT54G does allow passthrough but will not actually create and maintain the connections. Unfortunately I've little experience with any other hardware so can't advise.

Hope you find a helpful answer soon.

 

[antioed]

I wouldn't bother with setting up a costly VPN solution if you're just a few trying to securely access systems at the office. With a little savvy and effort you can set up a secure solution for this using the equipment/resources you already have. I would set up VNC on different ports on each of the hosts you wish to access remotely and then tunnel the VNC sessions through an externally available SSH server for security...as you may know the VNC protocol exchanges passwords in clear text so some level of encryption would be smart. This solution should work well in your environment as SSH is probably already running on the Mac and Linux clients so you could just set one as the SSH server and forward external WAN requests on port 22 to it, which the Linksys router can certainly handle. The rest is just a matter of sorting out port forwarding to each individual host and creating connection scripts for each of them...the best part is that it's all FREE!