SSh and other vpn clients

I'd like to drastically improve the security on my network.
I understand that seting up SSH tunnels for secure networking is a nice way
to go.

Are there tools that automate and simplify this process?

I have Suse 9.1 on intell.

What are the recommendations for vpn client packages>
Open souce preferred.

Thanks.

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, dougga <do-not-send-(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I'd like to drastically improve the security on my network.
> I understand that seting up SSH tunnels for secure networking is a nice way
> to go.
>
> Are there tools that automate and simplify this process?

man ssh_config
pico -w ~/.ssh/config

The "Host" line can be anything you want to call it. More than one Host
description can list the same "Hostname" with different port forwarding
setup. For example I might have one Host called "work" to ssh to our
smtp server, and one called "work-vtmgr" to forward ports through that to
our HP3000, etc.

> I have Suse 9.1 on intell.
>
> What are the recommendations for vpn client packages>
> Open souce preferred.

I have done ipsec with freeswan. It allows you to tunnel entire private
networks. But it is also more difficult, requiring root access on the
destination to arrange the authentication and firewall/masq for the ipsec
connection.

I had no luck with poptop (pptp).

If you just need to forward a few ports, ssh is easiest, because you only
need 1 port to connect ssh, and usually do not need root access on the
destination (unless opening remote listening ports < 1024).

dougga wrote:

> I'd like to drastically improve the security on my network.
> I understand that seting up SSH tunnels for secure networking is a nice
> way to go.
>
> Are there tools that automate and simplify this process?
>
> I have Suse 9.1 on intell.
>
> What are the recommendations for vpn client packages>
> Open souce preferred.

SuSE 9.1 includes OpenVPN, which works well.

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