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jimm123

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Simultaneous Cisco Client VPN Connections

Hello,

I have an office using a pix 506 configured to accept Cisco VPN client connections.

I have another office with 5 users.  They are on a workgroup LAN and use DSL service for Internet access.

Is it possible for multiple users in the 5 person office to establish a simultaneous vpn connection to the pix using the Cisco vpn client?

So user 1 connects to the pix via Cisco vpn client, then user 2, and so on.

Or is a vpn concentrator required?
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grblades
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Hi jimm123,
Yes it is possible. It will however depend what equipment the other office is using the share the DSL between users. If you are using a normal home (netgear , linksys etc...) DSL router then many of these dont support more that one VPN connection at a time through them.
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jimm123

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Not sure on the equipment.  Is there any particular router setting or service that would enable / disable multiple vpn connections?
If the router at the other office cannot support multiple VPN sessions then you might want to replace it with a PIX 501. Even if the DSL is PPOE or dynamic IP address you can still have a site-to-site VPN by configuring the remote site to work as an easyvpn client
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_configuration_example09186a008019e6d7.shtml
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grblades
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grblades, thanks for the info.
I was hoping to avoid using a pix for a 5 person office (cost reasons)
When discussing this option with the DSL provider I should inquire if the provided router supports multiple VPN connections and/or IPSEC pasthru?
It will have to support IPSEC passthru. It is a case if whether it supports a single passthru connection only or multiple ones.
I know that some of the D-Link support multiple passthru and Linksys normally only support one.
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Generally, the lower end broadband routers only support one VPN tunnel at a time with the Passthrough option.

You can get a Linksys VPN broadband router for ~$100 and setup a lan-lan VPn tunnel to the PIX and none of them have to use the VPN client.
Personally I would not use one of these home products in a commercial enviroment. My first home router was a SMC Barricade 7004br and this would repeatedly crash if you had lots of connections going through it. My second is a Linksys BEFSX41 and the initial release of firmware would not connect to a ftp server if the last octet of the ip address was over 127. It took them a few revisions and over 6 months to get VPN working.
There is not much profit in most of these home routers so the companies don't spend a lot of time and money testing them and so if you get a newly released model be prepared for software bugs.