[KLUG Members] question on firewall distro for VPN

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I have played with SmoothWall and it is impressive but there is one 
> limitation. I have a Windows 2000 machine running a VPN server for a 
> couple of our users. (3 to be exact) For instance the boss likes to 

What kind of VPN?  PPTP, ipSec, OpenVPN?

> I was hoping to use SmoothWall to eliminate the need for this extra 
> Win2k box. (Major $$ cutbacks in Education in MI these days) but in 
> order to do this you have to purchase add ons. Is there any distro like 
> smoothwall that would let me set up an easy to use VPN for a few users 
> while still letting me replace the firewall unit?

There is ipCop, which I believe has the same evolutionary heritage as
SmoothWall.  That is probably worth looking at.

> I would love to hear any of your experiences out there.

Once a edge-device reaches a certain level of complexity I personally
just ditch all the firewall-distros.  A SuSe installation for example
comes with a PPTP VPN server, and adding a OpenVPN server is pretty
trivial.  The iptables "firewall" code is in the kernel so every
distribution supports it.