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Linking two LANs (SD to LV)

L

lchyi

Senior member
How tough would it be to integrate two Sonicwall TZ170 Firewalls in two separate offices to setup a secure VPN between the both of them? So far our company is contracting a specialist that charges a bundle so I thought perhaps I can do the work. Is there anything specific to watch out for or should it be as simple as plug and play?
 
Need more info. What is on the other side of the firewalls. Bandwith. Static IPs? apps being used....
 
Maybe I have it all wrong, here's what it looks like we're doing:

One office San Diego, CA... one office in Las Vegas, Nevada. Over in the SD office there is a DSL line connected to a Firewall/VPN box connected to the switch. LV is similar but they have no firewall/VPN box yet and that's what I need to setup. Both parties need to access the internet. However, instead of seeing two separate LANs underneath it'll look like a single LAN (WAN?). Anyway, this is so that we can have the two servers in SD and in LV map network drives so that we can access applications remotely/locally without realizing that there are really two locations and two servers. Anyway, is using VPN tunneling the way to go (not looking for leased lines btw, too expensive)?
 
VPN will do what you are needing, whether it's practical or not you need to decide.

How important is the data? If it's extremely confidential, don't do VPN.
How important is up time? A frame relay connection would tend to be more reliable than a VPN connection.
How large are the files and what speed DSL will you be using?
Do you currently have static IPs from both ISP's? If not, you will.
Do you run specialty programs written exclusively for your company? If so you will need to contact them to see if they know of any issues. A VPN is not an always on connection, per se. If you let it run idle it will close itself off so to speak until you initiate traffic on it again. Some programs will see this as a lost connection. In my case it was a terminal emulation program for a Credit Union. The fix was simple, I just had to use keep-alives.

Anyway, in a nutshell, a VPN is transparent to the end user. When set up, they won't know if a mapped drive is on a server in the next room or the next continent (unless of course you're on a slow connection.)

Good luck.
 
Sounds like you need a little more that the speed that DSL will deliver. I just had a company that tried the same thing to save money. After 6 months or so it got so old waiting for data and cruption that they finaly bit the bullet and installed a p2p T1. They were kicking them selves for not doing it soner. I would look at the amount of network traffic generated now and see if the DSL will really hold up. Remember happy drones are productive drones.


edit: it would not be hard at all to configure the VPN connection. IP address and 30 minutes and it can be done.
 
Originally posted by: SNC
Sounds like you need a little more that the speed that DSL will deliver. I just had a company that tried the same thing to save money. After 6 months or so it got so old waiting for data and cruption that they finaly bit the bullet and installed a p2p T1. They were kicking them selves for not doing it soner. I would look at the amount of network traffic generated now and see if the DSL will really hold up. Remember happy drones are productive drones.


edit: it would not be hard at all to configure the VPN connection. IP address and 30 minutes and it can be done.
Click to expand...

sDSL lines can easliy reach 3 Mbps.......at a fraction of the cost of a full T.
In major cities like SD and LV, hopefully he's at a location where he can get good speeds. Heck, a small office could even run over a 768kbps line.
 
Great, transparency is just what we need. Right now we're running on 6mbps/768kbps DSL lines, I'd imagine a faster upload speed is needed. If so, this solution will soon be impractical considering we're a tiny business and $1000 for two T1 lines would kill us. However, I'm looking into what we are really using a day. Doesn't look like a ton.

So basically it should look like this:

Server and clients --> Switch --> Firewall/VPN --> aDSL modem --> [[[Internet]]] --> aDSL modem/Cable modem --> Firewall/VPN --> Switch --> Server and clients

and voila? It should work just like that? We'd look like one network upon log in? (LV getting from mapped drives in SD and vice versa?)
 
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