VPN question

[JCROCCO]

I have dsl at my office with an Netopia R7100 (which has VPN support).

I want to connect to it from my home (cable modem/router with XP Pro).

Is there anything special needed to do this?
Any extra costs or needed equipment?
Does my Cable modem/router at home need to have the abilty for VPN?

I only want to connect to it when working from home, not on all the time, is there another way to do it other than VPN?

Thanks

 

[Thoreau]

VPN is usually the best method to snag a connection back to work from home. I can't speak for the Netopia hardware specifically, but if it does have VPN capabilities (beyond simple passthrough) such as the capability to act as an endpoint, you should be able to just make yourself an account and set up the VPN connection through Windows (XP.)

With Astaro Linux, for example, I just created a username/password and told it what IP range to assign to VPN clients. Went to another location with a PC that was running Windows XP and went to the network connections folder. From there, I just added another 'connection' going through the wizard, choosing VPN when it asked. After that, any time I want to connect to my home network remotely, which is usually every day, I just double click on the VPN connection icon and log in. It's as if i'm just another computer on the LAN at home.

You'll definitely need to look more into the specs on the Netopia since some routers that tout VPN cabilities are only able to do point to point connections to other routers of the same or similar type. Smoothwall Linux was one such package that could let you connect two Smoothwall routers together via VPN, but could not do client to router connections.

 

[JCROCCO]

Thanks for the info.

When you said set up an account, thats not something you pay for or is a service right? You mean just set up the connection in the computer to go to your computer.

Never done this before, but it doesnt seem to be real hard, just dont know where to start.