VPN replacement solution... Advice required

[blondebier]

Hi Guys,

We currently have an infrastructure where we have some servers at a datacentre and we have a network at our office. These are two separate domains.

We have a Sonicwall setup at the datacentre and we use monowall installed on a soekris box to manage the VPN between the office and the datacentre. This is an always on permanent connection.

This solution works very well, but we are thinking of changing our office network and creating a new domain to replace the old office network and the question of what do we do about the VPN came up...

This link is critical and needs to be ultra reliable. If there was some redundancy built in to it that would be ideal.

I'm sure there must be better way of doing this with all this new VPN technology now.

Any ideas or advice?

Cheers,
Blondebier

 

[Grenage]

Is m0n0wall giving you problems?

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[blondebier]

No, not at all. It's been brilliant.

We currently run m0n0wall on a small soekris box. I think this is what causes me most concern. If it were to blow up, we'd need a replacement.

The soekris box is circa £200 before configuration and we'd need a backup as a spare. There's £400+ to maintain a reliable VPN.

I've been thinking of replacing this with something like the Netgear FVS318...? It's around £125, so buying 2 of these would be cheaper, but I am unsure about the reliability aspect of these routers...?

What are the pros and cons of using one of these vs m0n0wall?

 

[Grenage]

Well when we started off with site-site and client VPNs, we gave Netgear and Linksys a try. We didn't have wonderful success with Netgear's offerings, but Linksys RV routers were ok for site-site. They were God-awful for client VPNs.

We moved over to M0n0wall, and then PFsense (m0n0wall ofshoot) for VPNs and haven't looked back. They seem to be much more reliable at handling the connections.

The downside is that a dedicated machine will consume a lot more power than a dinky router. If we had to go down the road of dedicated routers for VPN management, we would definitely choose Cisco gear; it's not cheap, but it does it's job very well.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[psi07004]

Suggest you take a look at the Sonicwall TZ series to establish a site to site VPN connection. Small, cheap, and easy to setup with another Sonicwall on the other end.