What are you using for your VPN solution? I was thinking about going with OpenVPN, but there are so many options out there. I am thinking in the perspective of support, easy manageability, and scalability. I checked documentations for OpenVPN, Free S/WAN, and PoPTop. I am leaning on OpenVpn, because it will be an easy setup for remote home users. Free S/WAN for site to site connections. PoPtop looks good too, because it will an easy integration with Microsoft servers. What are your suggestions? Thanks again.

I use PoPToP because it is relatively easy to setup, it is geared towards computer to LAN vs LAN to LAN and it integrates easily with Windows as there is a built in client on all windows PCs. A note though I found the encryption implementation to be a bear, although this was before the PPP daemon had the encryption algorythms in it I had patch mine.

I am little concern about the security. Is Poptop complete new implementation of PPTP? MSpptp went through eight years of bug fixing to get to the maturity on win2003. Whole plug and play of PPTP is very desirable, but I am concern about the security.

I've used both "racoon" (ipsec-tools) and "OpenVPN" in various attempts to connect to routers of various types. (Like a SonicWall that uses their funky password scheme.)

Well, on the one hand, one-or-the-other of them "eventually worked."

But <<FLAME ON!>> neither one "just worked."

Frankly, truth be told, in one way or another, both of them sucked. (Ahem. In fact, they were able to move air equally well inward or outward through that orifice. And maybe the oth... umm, well, let's not go there. )

What ... "just worked?" Uh huh. My Macintosh. I literally wound up using a different computer to arrive at a solution that I could stand. I was extremely disappointed.

Especially when "The Type Of Computer Which Must Not Be Named" proved to be equally adept at it.

I used openvpn and it was very easy to setup, configure and run. As a newbie I thought it was one of the easier things to get running on my machine. There is another VPN solution that uses IPSec but I can't remember it right now but I'll get back to you.

I used OpenSwan (which grew out of Free S/WAN, IIRC) for IPsec tunnels. Linux clients connect directly to that using (another installation of) OpenSwan. To support Windows clients, we also had to support tunneling L2TP over the IPsec. This doesn't make sense security wise (IPsec is intended to be secure), but its the easiest for Windows users. Read documentation by Jacco de Leeuw and Paul Wouters (he wrote a book about it).