On Saturday 10 April 2004 10:01 am, Gianni Pucciani wrote:
> Hi all,
> some of you can give me some input about the best way to set up a vpn
> under two Linux RH9 systems?
> I heared there are different solution (PPP and SSH, PPTP...) and I'd
> like to know your opinion about that.
PPP is Point-to-Point Protocol, and has almost nothing to do with VPNs :)
SSH is Secure Shell, and at least it contains some encryption, but again, is
almost nothing to do with VPNs (but more on that later).
PPTP is Pretty Poor Tunneling Protocol (oh, no, sorry, it's a Point to Point
Tunneling Protocol...), and is the way Microsoft systems do VPN.
The "standard" way to do VPN (in other words, the method which is supported by
most vendors, uses open standards, and also has the best security) is IPsec.
The usual way to do IPsec under Linux is to use FreeS/WAN under kernel 2.4, or
the built-in IPsec under kernel 2.6.
I use FreeS/WAN, I like it, it works well with netfilter (once you've got used
to the path the packets take at each end), and I'm happy with its 3DES/RSA
security.
I said I'd mention more about SSH - that also uses good encryption and is
therefore secure, and once you have an SSH connection between two machines,
you can "tunnel" almost any network traffic you like between them, and it
does work, although I wouldn't select this as a first choice for a VPN
because there's a lot more manual setting up involved. IPsec is more like a
network route - you just configure it, and let the two endpoint machines get
on with negotiating the link, and then computers from whichever network
ranges you've configured the VPN to support can connect to each other
transparently through a nice secure tunnel across the Internet.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Antony.
--
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