Austin Smoothwall VPN
Consultant and Installation

In today's world, employees need to be able to access company IT systems regardless of where they are. SmoothTunnel provides a cost-effective, easy to manage VPN solution, combining Secure Remote Access for mobile users and site-to-site branch office to head office connectivity.


For Secure Remote Access, Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol (L2TP) is the recommended option, in conjunction with the L2TP software incorporated in Windows 2000 and XP. Alternatively IPSec can be used but this requires the installation of an IPSec client on the user's PC. IPSec clients tend to be relatively expensive and complex to configure, whereas the configuration of an L2TP VPN connection is a simple two minute job using SmoothWall's L2TP Wizard program. The SmoothWall implementation of L2TP uses the same Triple DES (3DES) encryption algorithm as normally used with IPSec VPNs. Likewise, x509 certificate authentication is used for maximum security, so there is no security trade-off for the simplicity of L2TP.

Inter-office VPN connectivity is based on IPSec technology. SmoothTunnel is a fully featured IPSec VPN gateway, including support for the latest AES (Rijndael) encryption algorithm, together with 3DES and all other current encryption algorithms. As with L2TP, x509 certificate authentication is normally used to ensure the identity of each node in the VPN network. The integrated Certificate Authority can be used to generate self-signed x509 certificates, or third-party Certificate Authorities can be used, such as that provided by Microsoft Windows® 2003 Server. Pre-shared key (PSK/shared secret) authentication is also supported for compatibility with older VPN systems from other vendors.

Complex VPN networks can be constructed using multiple SmoothTunnel VPN Gateways, such as to connect regional branch offices to their country head office, with further links from these offices back to their international head office. Local Certificate Authorities can be used to issue the x509 certificates for local VPN connections, with a central Certificate Authority issuing the certificates used to authenticate the international connections. SmoothTunnel will support up to one hundred VPN tunnels, depending upon the server hardware performance and the speed of the Internet connection.

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