lan to lan over internet

[stupot71]

Hi i have sought of asked this question before and we can pass files and remotely connect. what is the easiest way to connect LAN to LAN via the internet I have gotten confused with VPN and WAN.
What we have is
LAN + DSL <----INTERNET---->DSL + LAN

what we would like to do is have the silky smooth file transfer you do when you have a peer to peer connection ie be able to access shares/printers etc on both LAN's without too much bother.
sorry if this is a dumb question but I like messing these things up myself rather than calling an expert to bugger it up

[Melmac]

I did that. I used WINS. Its great, use there lines to run your WAN! First see if you can ping their WAN IP. If you can, try mapping a drive using the IP in place of a computername. It works. That's the real quick way. BTW, make sure that anything that blocks a WAN request is turned off.

You can set up WINS, push pull replication, all that stuff. But, dynamic IP's make it a pain in the a$$ from time to time. Hope this helps. :D

[Deity]

I think with your setup you would be ideal for a VPN. VPN tunneling would give you the appearance of your two workgroups being on the same LAN. ie. If you d-click NetNeighborhood you would see LAN1 workgroup and LAN2 workgroup. File transfer and resource sharing are a snap once the VPN is setup, expecially if you have a continuous connection like DSL.

The next issue is whether you want to run a hardware or software based VPN. For hardware you would have to purchase two VPN devices, one for each location and configure them to operate together. For software you would need two WinNT Server or 2K Server comps and configure them to control the VPN.

In my opinion these types of setups work extremely well. :)

[stupot71]

Thanks Deity sounds like what i want i will have to go the software route I am about to install Win 2K anwyay thnx ps is ther any good resource for setting this up

[Deity]

http://www.microsoft.com/ISN/ind_solutions/virtual_private_networking.asp

This page has a lot of good links to different areas of VPN setup and theory. You should be able to find what you are looking for there.

[Melmac]

Deity, good point. I failed to even think about it from the security standpoint. If this is for more than just playing, VPN is definitely the way to go. I should have thought about the idea of it being done for business issues. Oops. :eek:

[thirdfey]

http://www.labmice.net/networking/VPN.htm

There's some good info on VPN
www.isaserver.org (http://www.isaserver.org) is a good software VPN/Firewall solution to use with 2kServer

[stupot71]

Just out of curiosity is it only NT and 2K that have this ability or do other versions of ME 98 etc I notice they have VPN avialable is this different

[Milenko]

You need to be able to run a VPN server, which win9x doesn't do. What you see in win9x is the vpn client.

[silencio]

W2S had the capability of running site to site VPNs. Combine this with something like TZO (dynamic DNS) and you'll have what your looking for. TZO is handy because you don't have to keep up with your changing IP address (dhcp).

[iamtheman]

One thing worth noting about using Win2K servers for a site-to-site VPN is the amount of processing power it takes to encrypt data. That's the advantage of having separate "hardware" to create a VPN, a dedicated device will handle traffic a lot better.

Also the Internet today is quite an interesting place, if you aren't careful your systems will get owned.

[Fubarian]

One thing worth noting about using Win2K servers for a site-to-site VPN is the amount of processing power it takes to encrypt data. That's the advantage of having separate "hardware" to create a VPN, a dedicated device will handle traffic a lot better.

Kinda...if you got a p 200 mmx as your DNS server, you'll be fine!

you'll need 2k server to run most of this stuff...dns/dhcp/wins + vpn.