Questions regarding a router+simple VPN setup

[nbarb99]

Here's the deal: the boss of a friend of mine wants me to come over and set up a wireless network in his home office as he doesn't have a LAN (gasp). He's getting a laptop soon and wants to be able to roam around the house and still access his broadband cable connection.

'Tis a pretty simple setup - slap a NAT router+access point behind the cable modem, turn on WEP/WPA and go. However, he also wants to be able to VPN into the network while on the road and access his home PC.

I've never set up a VPN before, but I think this is a pretty easy case. I know that WinXP has much better VPN support than previous versions (i.e. Win9x). So, I assume that I just need to set up the home PC to allow "incoming connections" and set up a profile on the laptop to connect (via dialup or static IP/static hostname) to the home PC.

My main question is this: I'd probably get a Linksys router for the NAT/access point part, but is there any advantage to getting something like this, which has some type of "built-in" VPN capability, over something like this or this which only say they support "VPN passthrough"? In the case of using one of the latter two routers, do any ports need to be forwarded to the home PC in order to make the VPN connection work, or is it simply a matter of enabling the "IPSec Passthrough" feature in the web configuration page(s)?

 

[ScottMac]

"Passthrough" implies that the inbound (IPSEC/VPN) traffic will be "passed through" the firewall to something that will be the VPN endpoint.

IMHO, you'd be much better off with a device that can terminate the VPN at the firewall/router.

Which VPN client will your friend's boos be using? Cisco? Nortel? Microsoft?

Get a signature on paper that you will not be held responsible for damages to his computer(s) before you do anything. Opening up a firewall for *anything* greatly increases the risk of intrusion....expecially if you aren't completely familiar with the equipment and technology.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[nbarb99]

Thanks for your comments 🙂

Alright, I've been doing some research on the topic. I assume he will be using a Microsoft client (XP's built-in VPN client), unless that poses some major problem - so I'm probably looking at a PPTP VPN.

If I grabbed the Linksys WRV54G, would I be able to set it up so that mobile users could tunnel into the network? That's how I assume it could be set up, but most of the stuff I've been reading is talking about router<->router tunnels, not router<->client tunnels.

 

[nbarb99]

Night bump...