¶ VPN madness Posted 20 years, 6 months ago on June 29, 2005
Way back in the day, when we first got cable internet service through Cox @Home, we used a little Toshiba Satellite Pro 435 CDS running Redhat Linux 5.0 to serve as a home router. This was before they had the little Linksys and D-Link boxes that you can get at Best Buy for $20. It was a workhorse, never stopped, never failed. After a few years, though, they came out with the all-in-one routers, so we switched to using them because they use less power and are cheaper.

In the last few years, we've been trying to setup a virtual private network (VPN) between the home network and the office network, but the damn routers kept crashing. Linksys advertised that their routers could do VPN, but it was a total disaster. The things were unreliable to no end. I finally got fed up with them a few weeks ago and tossed them out and replaced them with some old Linux boxes we've had lying around. Brandon suggested some specialized distro a while back, but I like Debian, so I decided to do it the Debian way. There wasn't a Debian-specific document out there on how to do it, so I wrote one up after piecing together the parts.

It's been working beautifully for weeks now, both faster and more reliable than the crappy Linksys boxes ::mild bitterness:: we used before. Also setup a PPTP server so that windows machines could connect to the VPN more easily from on the road, but haven't documented that part yet..

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