Looking for easy/secure vpn solution for small company.
December 21, 2010 12:20 PM   Subscribe

Anyone have any experience with hosted vpns?

I'm looking to set up a vpn for a small company, with offices on the west coast and in India. We want remote access on the road across the US and Europe. Being able to ssh in would be a minimum, getting good enough performance to support an X session would be great.

End users are on windows, osx, linux.

I dont have the time or skills to keep an in house system up to date, so a hosted solution would be preferable for my peace of mind.

I've been looking at openvpn.net, which seems like it does what I want, but searching for background information just gets me lots of other companies using openvpn software.

Anyone have any experience with them, suggestions for other providers, or other approaches to this issue?
posted by yetanother to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
How many users will you have?

I currently use openvpn running on a DD-WRT router for myself and our other remote worker. The setup is somewhat complicated but it may be worth paying someone to set it up for you. Once it is running there is not a lot of maintenance to do. The hardware is $50, about the same as one month of openvpn.net's service.
posted by ChrisHartley at 2:08 PM on December 21, 2010


The university I work for is using OpenVPN for everyone, and even on a larger scale, it seems to be working okay from what I hear from the guys that run it.
posted by deezil at 3:16 PM on December 21, 2010


I love OpenVPN, have three setups, one at home on a tiny m0n0wall box for just me, another for a business with a dozen employees and yet another for a business with five times as many users.
posted by Brian Puccio at 3:46 PM on December 21, 2010


Response by poster: Around 10 users, but only one or two would (usually) be remote at any given time.

The $50 per month service charge would be worth paying for the peace of mind,
assuming we can trust openvpn.net

Thanks for the pointer to ssvnc.
posted by yetanother at 5:27 PM on December 21, 2010


The old system at work used pptp, but it wasn't great, but worked.

Recently I replaced it with OpenVPN (on Solaris) which is working great. I have tested the install of clients on Windows, OsX and Unix/Linux.

Most users are ok with the simple OpenVPN GUI for Windows, Tunnelblink and Viscosity on OsX, and the Unix users are very happy to just get the 7-8 line sample config file sent to them.

At home, I just connect Viscosity when I want, and can ssh to all internal servers directly, and frequently use VNC. Xterm would work, I just don't use them any more. I push the internal routes over, as well as, the internal DNS servers.

But it is only for the Unix team, so we don't use more than ~30 users at the moment.
posted by lundman at 7:02 PM on December 21, 2010


« Older Help me convince him that it does get better.   |   Why does my website look different on Apple... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.