Re: [Openvpn-users] Understanding OpenVpn

[Jon Bendtsen <jon.bendtsen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Den søndag 5.mar kl. 6:10 skrev Franck Y:

> Hello,
> I've some problem regarding Vpn, it's more like the "understanding  
> problem".

Maybe you should read some general text about a VPN, networking,
routing, ... It wont hurt to read about PKI as well.


> I've have at office a server running onto a FC4 (Fedora Core 4), with
> samba with the proper policies.
> Due to the grow of the business, i 'd like to give access to the
> server thought Internet. I'm totally lost about the option that i have
> OpenVpn/IPSEC, OpenVpn/SSL, OpenVpn/PPT...

They are just different technologies to implement a more or less
secure tunnel.
SSL is not only used in HTTPS, but in your case you can not use
HTTPS because you want access to a samba server.
SSH can not be used either, even though you can tunnel traffic  
through it.

Generally there are 2 VPN technologies, IPSEC and SSL based.
I dont know what PPTP/poptop is, but it is not secure enough. However
there is a built in support in Windows, so people does not have to  
install
anything to get it working.

IPSEC is secure enough, but rather complicated to setup, configure
and especially if any of your clients doesnt have a public IP address.
IPSEC is not that fond of NAT'ting, and even though there are built
in support in windows, not all IPSEC implementations can speak to
each other, because some use just IPSEC, others uses L2TP ontop
to tunnel the traffic through that.

SSL based VPNs, which includes OpenVPN, are generally easy to
configure and they do quite easily travel through a NAT. However
some of them are made by people that does not know what they are
doing, so they end up being insecure. However James and others
that code on OpenVPN appears to know what they are doing. I think
that there has been a independent security check of OpenVPN, and
the result was that no errors was found, so OpenVPN was secure.

So, choosing OpenVPN is a good and sane choice.

> What is the best solution for this configuration ? The other thing, is
> that the client are on win2000, Xp home, Xp pro.

OpenVPN supports all these clients.

Since you want samba and thus windows browsing to work easily
you want to use OpenVPN in bridging mode.



JonB



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