VPN or Intranet

Point value changed by question poster.

2 routers & direct routing

yes, i envy you. it is cisco time. ask your isp and/or phone company for help. if you want to really impress customer, spend the money you haven't made off them yet and call cisco/microsoft, see if you can afford them to consult. see how much you can find out presales wo pulling out cc. ask for resources and pointing in the right direction as much as hard solutions. buy some books dear! tell your story and ask for help. maybe you get some free help if you are nice and it is win2003 on at least one box. good luck

you haven't provided enough information for prelimnary design considerations. All you have said is customer wants to setup a means to interconnect 2 offices together and with subsequent comments said the equipment are XP and W2K boxes. you haven't mentioned the purpose of interconnecting the 2 offices. Whats the purpose behind connecting the 2 together? Share what? how often? how many actually need to access the other office? What is the existing type of service? If a company gave you the contract to do this, you must have shown them you know something about networking. From your post, it appears you know nothing.

I'm gonna flame you here because Techrepublic Q&A is rife with kiddies who play the 20 question and then do 20 rejected suggestions. This isn't the "lets see how vague a question you can ask and reject all answer forum".

:) Yeahh... the cheapest way to do it is not so good for you, but still you may reconsider it:

Run/Drive between the offices and supply the needed information either on a floppy disks or CD-ROM

if you have a simple network in one office of 1 box acting as a gateway e.g. ICS NAT box with a couple of the other boxes connecting to it via a hub or switch and the other office is the same setup and all you want to do is share files between the offices using the existing equipment [and there are no routers [commercial or consumer level in the mix, and you can't spend any $$ for the project,] use FTP. If you have some $$ to spend, buy 2 VPN End Point consumer level routers. The routers are the VPN End Point tunnel which means you can setup and maintain a IPSec 24/7 VPN tunnel between the routers. Users just use the tunnel to pass data back and forth. Ebay has some Linksys consumer level VPN End Point routers for about $30 to $50 USD. Note ALL computers and ALL users will be required to be part of the same workgroup. NTFS permissions on the shared folders.

An intranet will require you to setup a web site on one of the boxes. Though you could go this route, you'll still need FTP for upload and download of files to be shared. unless your talking about using something like Sharepoint Services. [which costs $$ and requires a server. which also costs $$].

well adding other offices into an existing 1 tunnel router VPN Endpoint complicates the network. Most consumer level routers won't allow more than 1 tunnel at a time. If the company expands to have 3 offices it probably has enough $$ to invest in servers [they are not that expensive]and use W2K or W2003 server remote access at each site. SOHO servers don't need to be top of the line $2k to $3k servers. Especially with 6 to 8 clients per office. A company thats SOHO with 3 offices each having maybe 8 computers of less, you get the Windows 2003 server + 5 CAL [add another 5 cal license pack] basic edition that includes RRAS server. The box, heck grab a AMD XP 2400 processor, 512 or 768 MB 2100 DDR memory, 2 40 GB drives, a mainboard with Promise RAID controller [I use MSI boards]. All new equipment with mfg warranty prolly cost around $600 per box. I'd get the Antec SX1040 SOHO case [or the Chieftec equivilent].

So for $1200.00 build your own servers plus W2003 basic edition 3 license and 15 or 25 CAL [prolly get 25 CAL note: comes with 5 CAL per licensed copy], and add in some 10/100 8 port switches, you got yourself a domain network with room to grow plus the add on maintenance/admin contract. you could also go the Small Business Server route platinum edition which includes Exchange server for their own email and ISA server at the HQ site and RRAS for remote office sites [though note SBS doesn't allow trusts between domains]. SBS 2003 Platinum single license is $1500 USD.