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VPN GURU's LEND ME YOUR EARS!!!!!

I have been trying to the best of my ability to gather information on the best site-to-site VPN solution for one of my customers. I am a LAN administrator for a Central School District as my “day job”, and I manage several businesses LAN’s for a side endeavor. Given my LAN background, I have never had to embark onto the WAN side of the house…..until recently. One of my clients recently acquired another business, and they would like this newly acquired business to use their server, and Automotive Management Application, remotely. This seems like a perfect fit for a site-to-site VPN solution, unfortunately I am familiar with their setup and configuration in concept only. I am looking at purchasing a Cisco 700 series or 800 series router for both locations, and going this route for the VPN. I will be using a 512 KB uplink/3MB download line through Broadband Cable ISP. I am also planning on registering two static IP’s. If you can find the time, any insight you can give to a VPN idiot would be absolutely phenomenal.

Thanks All-

JK

Bill_Fleury

Sounds like a plan, however if you want a very simple and easy to configure yet powerful router for the site to site VPN, you may want to check out the Kentrox Q2300 series routers. I have several site to site VPN's running with these boxes and rarely see problems of any kind.

http://www.kentrox.com/products/family_qseries/

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

stressedout2004

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wingatesl

That is a good link stressedout2004, but it can scare the uninitiated. Everything you need to do on the cisco products can be done in less than 10 minutes with 0 cisco knowledge using the SDM. The SDM is a practical tool to get a crash course in cisco without crashing the business. just make sure you go into preferences and select show commands before submitting to router.

Jandakel2

ASKER

LAN #1 192.168.1.0/24

Central Office Automotive Management Server: 192.168.1.250

Router #1 LAN Interface: 192.168.1.1
Router #1 WAN Interface: 64.566.21.39 (Static IP Assigned by ISP)

Router #2 WAN Interface: 64.566.31.38
Router #2 LAN Interface: 192.168.2.1

LAN #2 192.168.2.0/24

How does this look, as far as dirt floor configuration? Will I need to have an active Broadband Connection in both offices? How difficult would it be to set up both offices with broadband connections, so that if one office's connection goes down, the other offices connection could provide the Internet? I.e., resolve the single point of failure? Thanks everyone

JK

stressedout2004

The IP scheme looks ok. Yes you would need an active broadband connection in both offices (or whatever other means of internet access for that matter). For redundancy, you would need to have another WAN for internet, VPN relies on
VPN connection, so if the internet connection goes down, VPN goes down too. So if you want redundancy, you will need
to have another WAN connection that will serve as a backup in case the main WAN connection goes down.

Jandakel2

ASKER

Thanks stressed out2004.....if your stressedout04, im stressed out 06, haha.

JK

stressedout2004

hahaha. well aren't we all stressed...Good luck to you