Topic: VPN Limits

[Julie Random]

Can anyone tell me from their experience if the VPN remote access
is a viable VPN solution for a small business. I know it works as a
single user option I use it for remote admin.

I need to know how it handles a number of concurrent users, how
many would be stretching it? Could e-smith be used sucessfully as
a VPN server for an organisation?

Thanks for any responses and any suggested alternatives.

[Bill Talcott]

If you want to connect two locations, check out the IPSEC addon stuff. I'm not sure how much power more concurrent VPN users would require...

[chris meredith]

I use E-Smith as a firewall with thousands of connections being forwarded to an internal server, and thousands of emails being sent out every day.  I also have 3 or 4 people VPN'ed in moving files across.  It has been going for a year with no problems.

This is on a PIII 800 with 512M of RAM.  I have never noticed a slowdown.  As long as you have a decent machine you should be able to handle a pretty fair number of VPN connections.  Hell, if you look at a lot of the CISCO boxes they are 200Mhz or less machines with 32M of RAM.

If the users that will be VPN'ed in are coming from one location behind a NAT firewall, you will have issues.  The VPN server will only allow one connection from one IP.  That is the standard, though I know the Microsoft PPTP server will allow multiple connections from one IP.  If you need to do that, you would be best off creating one tunnel from the remote location (from the Firewall there for example) and having the users use that.