Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

I thought I'd try writing about IT itself for a change, instead of always lambasting the Government, the Telecommunication Industry, and the negative effects of IT (poor Colbert suffers my rhetoric more than most).

Today, I stumbled across a very useful tutorial about setting up your very own VPN. For those who are unfamiliar with VPN or Virtual Private Network, you can read up the basics of VPN at Wikipedia. If you are REALLY INTERESTED, you can always raid the CISCO Online Tech Library. But, if you are lazy, you can always bug the hell out of Colbert until he explains it to you (see what I mean when I said he suffers more than most).

For an organization with a large percentage of its employees working outside the office (e.g. Insurance Company, Construction Firm, Wise Guys from 'Joisey'), there is an ever-growing need to CONNECT those workers to the office network SECURELY. And this has to be done SEAMLESSLY so that the mobile employees can work as if they are sitting in their cubicles.

In a nutshell, a VPN is exactly what its name suggests, a pseudo-private network. Instead of building a SECURED PHYSICAL CONNECTION directly to the mobile employees (which is a very expensive proposition, not to mention inflexible), VPN makes use of the VERY PUBLIC and VERY UNSECURED Internet to connect the employees to the office.

 

To ensure that the data traveling across the internet is not intercepted or modified by unscrupulous individuals, VPN makes use of encryption to protect the data stream. This, in concept, is like creating a SECURE TUNNEL or PIPE (see preceding picture) between the employees and the office. Of course, there are many flavors and implementations of VPN (e.g. Tag Switching, MPLS), for the sake of discussion, I will concentrate on the most generic form.

Since this is going to be quite a lengthy article, I will split it into two parts (or more if necessary). Part I will be an 'Introduction to VPN.' Part II will contain actual step-by-step instructions to setting up a Home VPN.

To be continued...

	This article is by: YC (Guest Blogger) from the Technocrat Soapbox