Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Update on the VPN Issue

How appropriate was yesterday's blog entry? After writing it, I left for work. On my way to work, I got a call about the VPN not working for one of my users.

I spent probably two hours troubleshooting her previously-working IPsec tunnel to no avail. I finally gave up and told her I had to get off the phone to think about it. After some contemplation, I decided that I'd go for the gold and break out the new SSL VPN a bit early.

Of course, the only problem was that A) I had never touched one before, and B) The documentation was pretty meagre.

I hoped for the best as I pulled the device out of the box, then slipped the plastic bag from the chassis. It is a testament to how easy to use that netgear is that I had my user up on the SSL VPN and working within 2 hours. And it worked the first time I tried it with her.

If there's any kind of interest in a formal review of the Netgear SSL VPN device, I'll be happy to type it out, but in a nutshell, if you're dealing with a small office of users, and you want a firewall with VPN capabilities, that is the one to get.