VPN Tunnels, Oh What Fun.

A few years back I was tasked by the boss to create a secure connection between one of our servers and a really big telco. I'll call them Acme Telcom to protect the innocent. He also wanted to use an opensouce solution. I had to pass a testing phase first and Acme Telcom said that the only the only people to have any success with it in the past used BSD as the operating system and blah-blah programs to get the VPN tunnel working.

Well BSD wasn't going to work for me since the server used some flavor of Linux (the exact name escapes me at this moment) and after reading some reviews and have a good-old look at the few programs out there I settled in on Openswan. I've never seen it written anywhere but I think
it is an acronym for Opensouce Secure Wide Area Network and the program allows you to create secure connections across the web.

I wasn't able to find much help on the web, which I considered kind of weird so I got the company to plunk down the bucks to buy me the book "Openswan" by Paul Wouters and Ken Bantoft, and published by Packt Publishing. The book was full of options for the program itself and discussed in chapter 9, interoperability with other vendor implementations. Which is definitely what I was looking for. All in all it was a good read and I would recommend it for its covering of the history of IPSEC alone.

Within a week of reading this book I was able to go from not knowing squat about VPN tunnelling to having five tunnels running simultaneously from the same server and pushing SIP messaging across said tunnels to Amce Telcom's POPS. Not to shabby if I say so myself considering I was the first to do this with Acme and Linux.