[lug] VPN solution

[Ben]

This isn't a VPN solution, but it works for me. I use putty to create a 
secure tunnel between remote windows clients the samba server. Then 
windows clients access the files via "\\10.1.0.1" where that ip address, 
10.10.1. is a loopback interface on the windows box that putty tunnels 
to my samba server. It's a little tricky to setup on the windows side 
the first time, but after that, it is just one icon for putty and then 
they have fully access to the samba box. (Also works great from linux 
where sshfs , etc don't work if you want to maintain samba acl permissions)

For security, I create a user "remotesamba" that has no shell, etc, 
(putty is setup to not allocate a terminal) and then give each remote 
user a ssh-key linked with remotesamba to use. This way, they don't need 
another password to remember, and I don't need to give users shell/ssh 
access to the server. And I can revoke their access if I need to.

I can go into more detail if you want.

Ben


George Sexton wrote:
> I need to come up with a solution to allow remote windows clients 
> network access to my Linux samba server.
>
> I've just spent a day trying to get pptpd to work and I've finally 
> given up.
>
> I'm looking at the documentation for openvpn and it looks like openvpn 
> is pretty comlpex to configure as well. I would really like to avoid 
> travelling to the various remote sites to setup the VPN client, which 
> it looks like OpenVPN would pretty much require.
>
> Since I really don't have another day or three to devote to this, can 
> anyone recommend a commercial hw solution that will actually work?
>