Im am setting up a linux box specifically for VPN use. I don't know what type of VPN's I will be connecting to untill last minute, and need to be able to support a wide range of VPN products.

We have been using rhel3 and redhat9. I have chosen a single processor computer, as cisco's vpnclient doesn't work with SMP kernels...

I was thinking of setting up this box using shrike, unless there is a reason why some other distro would be better with this type of stuff.




As far as the S/WAN's go. Im thinking I won't go with freeswan as its no longer being maintained. but does anyone have any input on Openswan or Strongswan? Any other recommended VPN or IpSEC stuff?

Key things that I am looking for are (in order)
1. Will support the most types of connections, or protocals.
2. Is commercial support available.
3. ease of setup. - well the last one isn't a biggy.

I think Openswan (http://www.openswan.org/) is the successor to freeswan and is still in active development.

If you've got a choice of what VPN you setup then personally I'd recommend Openvpn (www.openvpn.org) over any of the IPSec based ones anyday due to its simplicity (10 times easier to setup than IPSEC), native support for NAT and use of openssl libs (security problems will be the same ones that affect SSH and all that and therefore will get fixed just as quickly).

Out of curiousity, do you (tkedwards) know of a Windows client for OpenVPN? At my school, we use a Cisco VPN client for access on the wireless network, and was hoping to set up something similar at my house so I can access NFS and SMB shares without exposing them to the internet. (SSH tunneling would only work for a single host on the remote LAN)

http://openvpn.net/download.html
http://openvpn.se/