If you have ever had to setup VPN over Windows XP, you may have faced the issues I had. I am going to introduce a FREE VPN solution here in my post.
In Windows XP, we got two issues for VPN.
- The very first one is limitation of one concurrent users connecting to the VPN Server which is a Windows XP.
- The second one is in PPTP which the IPSec Traffic, I think IP Protocol 47 if I remember correctly, is not routed in some of ISPs and this makes you stop getting PPTP worked. The other solution on Windows XP is L2TP which is also hard to implement and again you got the first issue.
So, whats the solution if you want to run one in an environment like mine?
One solution is using the mediated peer to peer solutions like Hamachi. After you connected properly to your peer on your desired network in Hamachi, there you go! You got some invalid IP of class 5.x.x.x in which you can route the network traffic as you could in any other method. But I faced two issues using Hamachi also:
- The first one was the fact that, the Hamachi server might go down anytime; so you will loose your connection.
- The other issue was the fact that in my ISP, the Wireless solutions, UDP traffic is not routed properly. Not only Hamachi but also I have tried some RTP traffic and they have also had some issues.
The solution that am using for the a month or so, is
OpenVPN.
OpenVPN is a cool VPN solution on Linux/Windows in which it uses not only regular user-based authentications (which I think you can connect it to AD or things like that), but also you can generate certificates preventing users authentication or even both modes! I have used certifications and it has worked really nice, not sure about the user authentication. There are pretty cool install guides on their site for Linux platform, but no proper one for Windows. You might use the guide I used for Windows
here.
I should admit, OpenVPN made the secure room I was looking for a long time. Try it!