Dial-Up Options

VPN tunnels secure traffic through the 'net via end-to-end encryption. Therefore, it requires software on the client to be configured. The encryption overhead will slow down the traffic because of the encryption and encapsulation, compared to clear traffic, so expect the network speed as seen by the client to drop a bit. On the other hand, this technology has been around for a while so most of the bugs are worked out and it's easy to find people who know how to do it.

Citrix is a thin-clientsystem, i.e. every key press or mouse click is sent to the application server, which sends back the screen picture, and the server is doing all the processing. It is nice because the hardware requirements on the client are lower, but the network overhead is high. The Citrix client I have in my current job is unusable at certain times of the day, because the WAN link is too clogged and it has low tolerance for a busy network. I don't think it would work over dial-in, but I don't have any experience with the Citrix server setup so I may be wrong.

Don