On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 10:28:43AM -0500, Rob Gridley wrote:
> I donšt really know if I should call this a VPN, but this is what I want to
> do. I have a number of users that want to be able to access the internal
> network at my office from their homes. I want to use the internet to do
> this.

This would indeed be VPN.

> I've done a lot of reading about IPSec in NetBSD and FreeBSD and come up
> blank. It seems to be very easy to connect two remote networks together or
> to connect two hosts together, but having a single computer with VPN Client
> software access an internal network seems to be impossible.
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas about how to do this?

The quick and easy is to set up PPTP, but it is not the recommended
method.  If you've already got an NT/2k box at work, you can enable PPTP
w/o too much trouble.  Most versions of Windows have PPTP clients already,
getting the Unix PPTP stuff working isn't mure more difficult than
setting up any other ppp connection.

The 'better' free (as in beer) solutions would be Free S/WAN
(www.freeswan.org) for Linux or KAME (www.kame.net) for BSDs.

There are also several commercial solutions.  I've used Intel's
NetStructure VPN, Nortel's Extranet Access, and RedCreek's Ravlin.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org