Dear Friends,
We have many branch offices, Some traveling persons and a few third party corporate S/W developers who are suppose to solve some S/W related problems remotely.
HO has about 20 to 30 Nodes and branches have 5 to 10 nodes. all have Linux Servers and RDBMS based C/S application. All nodes are having W9x/XP running on them.
Recently Internet facility is being introduced by a ISP at all the locations in slabs of 128K, 256K, 512K, 1M speed. this facility is available with Dynamic IP addresses No Fix IP is Offered right now. The internal IP with in LAN are as Follows
10.x.y.1 for Server and Nodes 10.x.y.11 onwards. where x = int(Branch Code / 100) y = mod(Branch Code/100) Branch Code is 100 For HO and 110, 120 like for branches Last digit is used for any extension Counters but are not being used
Now we want to establish a VPN with minimal investment. The data sharing between branches is very limited at present like viewing stocks, transferring documents files, extending software related support entering requests for any stock transfers etc. etc. But we wish to avail Internet facility for all the Users. A user from one branch should be using a application in his own branch to full extent but he will be using a downscaled application in another branch with local database at respective sites. We are not planning a centralized data warehouse like concept. But for support purpose we need to have access to any node from any place.
When searched on google i got two three options like FreeS/WAN, StrongS/WAN, OpenS/WAN and Open VPN.
Can somebody suggest me which option would be better to start with ? some urls to read more on this VPN technology. Management is ready to spare one or more dedicated PCs for VPN gateways but those are Intel based PII/P4 range PCs.
Thanks and Best Regards.
R. S. Patil
