N to N VPN routing?

Hi,

This is my first post here.
I've searched the web and asked a few people about this, but still could not find an answer. Sorry if it is obvious or has been dealt with before here.

An acquaintance of mine has a small firm with offices at 5 different addresses, all within the same city. All offices have ADSL internet access and he now wants to interconnect them all so every office "sees" all of the others, map shared network folders, exchange files, etc. At present he has dinamic IP assigned to each office by the ISP, but he is willing to switch to fixed IP if that is part of the solution.

Am I right to assume that VPN contemplates *one* server being accessed by a number of clients? If so, would client "x" talk to client "y" (none of them is the server)? Is VPN even the recomended technology for such a network?

Thanks for any pointers,
Bruno.

Hi,

I would say initially that the VPN route is the best option for a small company. As the company gets bigger you may need to consider some kind of WAN connection, with each office having an individual LAN network.

But others here may disagree, so let's wait and see.

Anyone else got any ideas?

Hello brunobl, welcome to the site
VPN is a bit of a catch-all term which includes two basic arrangements. The one most people think of is remote access, where a number of mobile workers connect into their company via VPN (many-to-one). But you can also establish point-to-point VPN tunnels between fixed sites (one-to-one) in pretty much the same way.
I'm assuming that one of your offices is the 'head' office and the others are branches or similar. If that is the case, each branch office could have a point-to-point VPN tunnel across the public internet to head office. If all branches are of equal status you could also consider each branch having up to five outgoing tunnels to provide a full mesh though I think that could get messy. Basically all you need is ADSL routers with VPN capability and a bit of configuration

Thanks Rockape and TheBishop,

In fact he will need any one of the offices to be able to see any other office so it does look like the many outgoing tunnels at every site as you desribed, TheBishop (indeed it might get a bit confusing). Good to know that it is a matter of coniguring VPN-capable ADSL routers.

I will take a look on what models are available and what is involved in such configuration.

Thanks again for the pointer,

Bruno.

for a hub and spoke model, where all outlying sites connect to a central point, a VPN-Capable ADSL router will work.
For a full mesh scenario, such as you are describing, where all sites to connect to each other directly via VPN, you will want to look into something bit more robust and higher performance such as Cisco PIXes, or Cisco routers with ADSL VWICs and a vpn capable IOS.

you might also want to checkout Check Point's Edge X or W series (a.k.a Safe@ or Sofaware) of VPN capable firewalls. They even come in DSL varieties now.