On Saturday 10 April 2004 10:01 am, Gianni Pucciani wrote:I thought that they could be used in conjuction to achieve vpn functionalities...
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.Ok, I'll investigate this solution :-), thanks.
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,
Sure it helps :-) Thank you very much!
Gianni
Regards,
Antony.
