Peter Sutter wrote:
G'day
I have two remote locations that connect to the internet via ADSL (256kb/s), one with address range 192.168.1.0, the other with 192.168.0.0. I am currently exploring ways to make the resources in either subnet available to the other. In each subnet is a SuSE Linux V9.2 machine as a file server. There are only 10 users in one subnet and 3 in the other.
What is the best way to link the two? Establish a vpn tunnel?
Since you are going across an insecure network (the internet) you will need some sort of encryption, and the notion of a virtual private network is exactly this, so yes.
Can I use the SuSE servers using ipsec/pptpd etc,
Well, you can, but then you would have to make the server the gateway to the other network for every other machine on the network (or possibly set up some redirection rule on the router to point all requests for the remote network to the suse server), as well as set up a reverse NAT for the relevant port(s) for the VPN program you choose to use. If you make the change on the machine that already is the gateway (the router), then you wouldn't have to change anything on any other machine.
or is it better to replace the two routers and get the tunnel established between the two routers?
This would be my preferred solution, I believe it is the simplest to do, as well as the least complex.
Is there yet another, and possibly better way to achieve this?
What is your experience with either of the setups?
I've set up a couple of VPN networks using FreeS/WAN, I haven't used its successor OpenS/WAN. Between two suse machines, it has been relatively straightforward. But then, my setups focused only on access, there were no performance requirements, so I didn't look into that at all