Branch Office - connectivity to rest of network

[Norphy]

One of our schools is close to central London and has a sports field that isn't attached to the main building; it's about 1/4 of a mile away. We need to connect this sports hall to the rest of the MAT's network.

 

It's a hilly area so there's no line of site which makes a wireless link impractical and there aren't enough people who work there to justify putting in a leased line or P2P connection. At the moment, it's using a xDSL connection to connect to the internet but that has its own issues.

 

I therefore want to put in a FTTC internet connection and have a site-to-site VPN going back to the main office. What do you think would be best for implementing that? A hardware router with a built in IPSEC tunnel? A small PC running pfSense or something similar?

 

Any recommendations for hardware?

 

Thanks

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hardware router with ipsec.

 

Checkout something like a draytek or a fortinet device to do the job as they're easy to use and rock solid.

 

Dave

[mavhc]

Only problem with Fortigate is you have to pay for support every year to be able to download updates that fix the bugs they put in it.

 

Other option to look at is WireGuard, really simple to set up.

[MatthewL]

Could do it quite cheaply with a pFsense SG-1100 box from Netgate, just need to bridge with the current modem.

[ibpalle]

Or setup a custom linux box, no need for direct internet, just setup the VPN and use it as the gateway for the remote network. For IPSEC just forward UDP ports 500 and 4500 to the internal VPN router on both sides.