Private VPN service Recommendations

Sonic runs IPSec which is about as good as it gets. If you can live with PPTP or an SSL VPN, you can terminate the VPN with any commodity router that supports PPTP or SSL VPN's, or a Linux server, or even a Windoze 2000/2003 server. The catch is that the box or server has to be sitting on a fat pipe, which usually means sitting in the ISP's server farm.

I roll my own which terminates at a friends router that's sitting in a server farm. It's fairly fast. I also have PPTP VPN terminations setup on my office and home routers. With DSL lines, it's *REALLY* slow. I use these only for checking if I have any email or testing.

There are some other VPN terminations. See the FAQ:

One that looks interesting is iPig:

which offers a free VPN server (iPig Server Express Edition):

I haven't tried it, but if you have a Windoze box running somewhere, it might be an easy solution.

I've had VPN's setup at home for quite a while. I would not call it "really slow". It's as fast as your uplink speed. I've had a 1.5/512 connection for a while and it's certainly faster than a 768/128.

One other alternative to VPN is to use a remote desktop session. This way you connect to your home PC as a video client. RDP takes about 20k per session, more than usable over a 128k link. You can't watch full motion video through it but it's good for nearly everything else. If you don't want to use RDP you could use VNC instead. There's lots of ways to make it work.

The single biggest hassle to using your own home connection is the dynamic IP address. Sign up for a dynamic DNS service and set it up on your router. I'll work well enough most of the time.

-Bill Kearney

I'm on 3.0/256 in the office and 1.5/256 at home. Those speeds work fine for everything except the automagic updates that Microsloth and every other vendor insists on dumping on one's machine without asking. I have to turn off all that stuff on my laptop in order to use my laptop effectively through a slow connection. If I don't use my laptop for perhaps a week, I'm guaranteed a few megabloats of downloads before I can start using the laptop.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with splitting the traffic on the laptop. The email traffic goes to my home router VPN which I treat as a proxy server. Everything else goes through the gateway on the coffee shop wireless router. I haven't been in one place with my laptop long enough to set it up correctly, or be sure it's working, but it seems like a reasonable compromise.

I use RealVNC extensively. Works well but is slow. So is MS Remote Desktop, GoToMyPC, and PC Anywhere. What's odd is that they are slow at different things. Each one seems to optimize some part of the puzzle, at the expense of others. Weird.

I've been using DynDNS for years. I think I'm up to about 30 machines. No problems except compatibility issues with broken built in DynDNS clients found in some routers.

In my experience, IPsec (native on OpenBSD, USAGI on linux) with 'isapkmpd' key management has been a good solution. The free 'Secure Sentinel SSH' Ipsec VPN client for Windows performs well, and over slower connections is quite tolerable. No need to co-locate your VPN endpoint at the ISP for small-scale applications. Costs only your time to implement (on DSL and WiFi) and can save the O.P. a lot of moolah in the long term.

Regards,

Michael

Agreed. RDP is a great solution and if you use 'rdesktop' (be sure to follow the development threads regarding security and other issues), you don't need to buy TSCALs. Full motion video ain't so intolerable on faster links too.

Lots of independent ISPs will give you a /30 for real cheap -- a better solution than dynamic DNS.

Michael

Yeah, that's why I don't do my own. I had Sonic until earlier this week. I gave them a lot of chances to fix their service, but it was unbelievably flaky, somewhere between my DSL modem and them. Then I realized that they had upped my price from $30 to $50/month, and I was getting under 1Mb/s throughput, so I went back to AT&T. While the tech support at AT&T is unbelievably horrendous, so far (1 day) the actual DSL service works much better with no intermittent drops several times an hour.

I don't think it's free anymore, except for very limited periods of time.

I'm trying out Jwire now.

frisco had written this in response to