Easiest way to provide VPN access easily for all client OSes?

Question

I would like to set up VPN access for people in my company to use when they are working from home and on the road. We have a VPN service built into our Watchgard firewall, but it requires a Windows-only custom client and some of our employees have Macs or Linux computers.

I am not any sort of networking expert so the solution would need to be really easy to set up, maintain, and use. I have a mild prejudice toward Linux solutions but a Windows one would be fine too so long as it supports any kind of client.

Answer 1

Consider looking into OpenVPN. Mac OS X can connect natively to OpenVPN/PPTP servers, as can Windows using "Start -> Network Connections -> New Connection -> VPN".

OpenVPN can of course be run on Linux, although I can't really offer any experience in doing so. If you've got an OSX Server lying around somewhere, the very same OpenVPN can be set up with about four mouse clicks tho.

have fun, winsmith

Answer 2

Watchguards use a fairly standard IPSEC VPN, so there's a number of ways of getting Linux/Mac to connect to them - OpenSwan is one, you can also use OpenVPN or Racoon IIRC, although I wouldn't promise that any of these will be entirely straightforward.

I think Macs have an inbuilt IPSEC client which should be fairly easy (although I haven't tried personally).

If you want to use something else altogether cisco have VPN clients for Windows/Linux/Mac.

Answer 3

OpenVPN is a good, cross-platform choice. I have ran it on Mac OS X and Windows XP, don't think I have set it up on Linux, but it should work without a problem.