VPN help if you please.

Faithless · 28 Mar 2007 at 19:37

Hi,

I'm looking for some help here. A few friends of mine are going into mini business together, they have 4 identical laptops and a router and two Ethernet printers.

They dont have a server. The router and printers are in their office and at least one laptop will be here all the time but only switched on between 9 and 5. The router and printers will remain on all the time (or at least one printer).

What I want to know is, if all four laptops are networked together for file sharing purposes and one person works from home as opposed to coming in to the office, how can they VPN to the router in order to file share with the office laptop and be able to print (so, file share and print remotely I guess).

Can VPN do this? Connet to a router as opposed to a specific machine, that way using the routers bandwidth.

Thanks

scratch · 28 Mar 2007 at 20:12

You can't just VPN into a router. They're gonna need some kind of VPN server, be it a dedicated device or maybe just a Remote Desktop session. This way they will have access to the resources in the office from home.

How are they going to protect their internet connection from unauthorised access from the outside world? It's ok to allow your workers to access their data from the internet but they need to bear in mind that they need to lock things down tight.

Sounds like they could do with setting up a firewall/vpn box. We use a WatchGuard Firebox at work which provides both features in one dedicated device. You first install a VPN client on the remote computer. The user can then VPN into the Firebox and hey presto they have access to the internal network. Takes a bit of configuration and a dedicated device isn't cheap, but it works well for us. I'm sure there may be software solutions to do the same job though.

Andy

iwrox · 28 Mar 2007 at 20:16

You can VPN into my router

scratch · 28 Mar 2007 at 20:24

iwrox said:
You can VPN into my router

Sorry should have said "most routers"

oddjob62 · 28 Mar 2007 at 21:01

Draytek Vigors support VPN end point.

Decent priced reliable (imo) routers.

Faithless · 28 Mar 2007 at 21:39

So do you have VPN software on each laptop which can contact the router?

Do you have to enter authorised user details into the router via its 192.168.1.1 interface?

What Router do you use?

oddjob62 · 28 Mar 2007 at 22:04

Faithless said:
So do you have VPN software on each laptop which can contact the router?

Do you have to enter authorised user details into the router via its 192.168.1.1 interface?

What Router do you use?

I can only answer for the Vigors that i mentioned....

No you don't have to.

Yes you set up accounts for each user on the router.

Pretty much any of the Vigors will do this.