Rain, Flood, Cockermouth and setting up a VPN...

[westleya]

My school is Cockermouth School, and it's a bit damp up here...

Anyhow, a local company's been washed out and they would like to use our (perfectly fine ) internet connection to give them access via thier own laptops to thier network in another part of the country.

The laptops are already set up and work fine through any home broadband connection, but I really don't think they'll work through our proxies.

In addition to our ISP connection, I also have a single unfiltered connection with a public IP address. Never having set up a VPN before, what exactly do I need to hang off this in order to get it working ? First thoughts here would be a PC running a software router. Would this suffice ?

Help !

Regards all

Adrian

[theriver]

Hello

Sad to see the pictures coming out of Cumbria at the moment, good luck!

For the purposes of this discussion, VPNs come in two basic flavours:
- a permanent point-to-point setup where you have a permanently open tunnel between two public IP addresses (which is what I think you're referring to when you ask about a software router)

- an ad-hoc setup where the laptop plugs into the Internet and just dials in to the VPN whenever it wants to

You say that the laptops will connect to the VPN through home broadband - this implies that the latter kind of setup is in place for these machines already. In theory then all you'd need to do is plug a switch into the router on your public IP, and then plug the laptops into the switch - they can then all connect to the home VPN via that Internet connection as normal.

HOWEVER

There's plenty of things that can not quite work properly in this situation:

Some VPNs don't like NAT
Some routers I've seen don't like having more than one VPNing device attached
and so on.

The only way really is to try it out.

I think you're right about the proxies, by the way - unless the VPN they use is SSL based, and then you *might* find that the traffic is allowed.

HTH.

[theriver]

I have just realised how massively inappropriate my username is at this moment . . . . .

[CPLTD]

My school is Cockermouth School, and it's a bit damp up here...

Anyhow, a local company's been washed out and they would like to use our (perfectly fine ) internet connection to give them access via thier own laptops to thier network in another part of the country.

The laptops are already set up and work fine through any home broadband connection, but I really don't think they'll work through our proxies.

In addition to our ISP connection, I also have a single unfiltered connection with a public IP address. Never having set up a VPN before, what exactly do I need to hang off this in order to get it working ? First thoughts here would be a PC running a software router. Would this suffice ?

Help !

Regards all

Adrian

hope your well and safe fella

[steve]

This sound similar to our setup.

The laptops will need to be on the same subnet as the unfiltered connection (ADSL?) and they will need configuring with the default gateway of the router connected to this connection. Everything shold the route out over that instead of the proxied system.