VPN site-site

Hi, Bit of a noob here.. but need to explore setting up a site to site VPN
for 3 places...

We are in Australia, and are setting up offices in India and China..
We want to be able to setup a VPN from each office to the other, eg in a
triangle..
Easy in itself, but could I get some suggestions on what would be the best
options as far as security goes..
running Win 2k Server here in Aust, will be running either 2k or 2k3 in
india/china, some sort of VPN router and firewalls in other countries

what exactly is a necessity, and what would be advisable extra's?

TIA
Ben

 

Put a Windows server in each location and configure L2TP+IPsec
site-to-site VPNs. I like L2TP+IPsec better than pure IPsec tunnel
mode because L2TP will create virtual interfaces inside RRAS that you
can manage, put perfmon counters on, run routing protocols over...just
like with real NICs. Pure IPsec tunnel mode is more difficult to run
day-to-day.

There are step-by-step guides and technical overviews at
http://www.microsoft.com/vpn.

Steve Riley

 

Hi:

We are a small company with Windows 2003 server and some Windows XP Pro
system, with a private domain.

For many reasons, our server is not always on, but currently, all client
systems are working fine in terms of folder/file sharing even when the
server is off.

Right now, we are thinking to set up VPN for people working at remote
locations, and we are exploring two approaches:

(1) Through Windows 2003 server, and/or
(2) Through Windows XP Pro build-in VPN function.


My question is that if we set up VPN through Windows 2003 server, can client
systems still access each other when the server is off? Or the server has
to be on all the time in order for the client system to access each other?

Many thanks in advance.

 

I guess it doesn't really matter which OS you use for the VPN server, but
keep in mind that XP won't allow more than 10 connections.

Regardless of which OS you use, if you want clients scattered all over the
place to be able to see each other and exchange files over file shares, you
will need to leave the VPN server online all the time. You're building a
"star," where the hub is the VPN server and all of the remote clients connect
to it. If the server is down, there's no way for the clients to see each
other, since remote clients never connect directly to each other (and you
wouldn't want this anyway).

Steve Riley