Simple VPN

[MrCoffee]

Hi guys, can you throw some suggestions at me for setting up a simple VPN for some people I know? Something you've personally tried would be good.
Its got to be simple because they're far from being technically compotent.

Its for business purposes so its got to be secure and reliable would be good. Both ends of the VPN will have a NAT broadband/router. All systems running XP but I don't know if thats home or pro.

 

[MrCoffee]

i'm thinking Hamachi

anyone got any experiance with that or other suggestions?

 

[Shannon]

I second Hamachi. I love it and use it all the time. I have it installed on all my machines, and all the machines at my parents' house and I recently reccomended it to one of my boss' work associates to use to access his work computers from home after he had surgery and he was able to use it easily. He was able to download it and set it up himself with just a little explaination from me.

Hamachi with RealVNC or UltraVNC if you want remote access. If you check out the Hamachi forums, there are lots of tutorials for cool stuff you can do with it and that sort of thing.

 

[jmhill1976]

Or you could use stunnel - a software which uses SSH to encrypt TCP connections.

 

[MrCoffee]

I think i'll give hamachi a go, it uses UDP I think which would give it a performance boost over TCP based tunneling... still keep the suggestions coming, I want a few viable options really in case I get there and there are complications.

 

[jmhill1976]

it uses UDP I think which would give it a performance boost over TCP based tunneling

You mentioned reliability. Make sure they've got a "reliable" connection, or they might start exchanging corrupt data since there is no sequencing information in UDP.

 

[MrCoffee]

I'll bear that in mind, cheers