Veeam PN brings the site-to-site / point-to-site VPN to you. Free.
Ever needed to make a small scale site-to-site or point-to-site VPN? Want to get all your friends on a LAN? Have one dedicated off-site location/house you need to access from work? Want all your corporate traffic to go through a VPN you manage?
Can you forward one UDP port from your router, run a virtual machine at a host location, and want it for free?
I was recommended this gem of a tool yesterday after waiting 13 hours for an off-site backup to complete on a dual 1-gig fiber connection that the VPN was running a whopping 0.5 to 3mbit average speed. No, it was not using file-based / NTFS / FAT drive mapping, I’m not kidding the VPN was just terrible. Only had to move 280 gigs and took half a day.
About two minutes to deploy the Veaam PN OVA to a VMWare server (free for most components,) or a MS Hyper-V (free with Pro? Might require converting to a different format using a free tool,) or a VirtualBox (free) on a local machine (probably not free) and a couple of minutes creating a signature, configuring the local HUB, IP space, and deploying an OpenVPN template to the remote machine and I was golden.
Instantly my off-site was able to connect in, I was getting about 320mbit (much better than 3) on a virtual system that probably can go a little faster (I haven’t tweaked it yet, and I think the network card it was assigned to maxes out about 600mbit,) and yeah. I’ve tried so many free VPN softwares in the past that just sort of worked a bit, or had a limitation of 4 or 5 connections (terrible if you’re trying to play serious private server games with friends,) or just did not work. Ever.
If you’re communicating with anything on the LAN where you’re hosting the VPN, do be aware you’ll need to put in a masquerade rule on your firewall/router to route certain traffic back through the free VPN, but other than that the guide is good, the product appears to function perfectly, and damn I’m impressed.
If you can’t put the masquerade rule on the firewall you can route it on whatever servers you might need to do something like “route add 10.20.7.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.20.7.1”
Also nothing requires payment, does upgrades with a click, clients download OpenVPN and just connect. Can do site to site, point to site, yadda yadda yadda.
Seriously, read the docs on this one – they’re made to be readable by people who have been up 27 hours and are at the end of their rope.
