I have a simple VPN setup for a few remote users. The purpose of the VPN is to simply allow remote access to the company LAN from one’s home, and possibly from a laptop on the road. All remote clients up to now have been using either dial-up or broadband for their Internet connection.
At the office end of the VPN is a Linksys BEFVP41 router. A specific VPN tunnel is created at this router for each remote client. (As many as 70 separate tunnels are possible, but I plan to create only about 6.) At the remote client end, I’m using SSH Sentinel IPSec client software. After the SSH software is configured, the remote user opens the VPN connection and simply maps a network drive to the office LAN. It works pretty slick.
One remote user, however, is using a satellite Internet connection, and it just doesn’t want to play nice with my plan. I haven’t been able to confirmed this, but I suspect that the satellite ISP – DirectWay – has problems with IPSec protocol. Their tech support folks claim that it “should” work with a VPN using IPSec, but it “has to be setup correctly”. (Talk about stating the obvious!) However, they can’t support VPN connections and won’t talk about it at all, so other than saying that it “should” work with IPSec, they aren’t any help at all.
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