Now that I’ve got something basic working, I hope this guide that might be of use to some clueless VPN soul somewhere using the same OS and hardware. Since Bikerpapa has never setup a VPN before, he encountered many pitfalls along the way. In this guide Bikerpapa sets up a remote client to gateway VPN using Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 and the Linksys RV042 VPN router. After some casual usage, I thought it was still a bit slow compared to normal ADSL in the cities but the speed is probably adequate for VPN sessions consisting of low bandwidth tasks such as firing up ssh shells on remote servers that reside on the remote site’s LAN. The thought of using VPN occurred to me when the remote site finally got a broadband satellite internet connection last week. Best of all, Bikerpapa can sit at home and diagnose problems with a good cup of latte in his hand. And the secretaries get their problems solved much faster, too.
If certain problems can be taken care that way, then Bikerpapa can save his company some travel expenses. It’s too far to drive and too expensive to fly for minute IT problems, so Bikerpapa wants to experiment with a VPN solution that allows him to sit at home and fix things right away for those secretaries when something goes wrong. These days Bikerpapa often needs to doctor computers for the clueless secretaries in a remote site about 300 miles away.
