How well do various products interact?

[Alex Strasheim]

I have never set up a VPN before, but my employer is opening up a 2nd
office and I need to put something in place.

Is it reasonable to use an OpenBSD box on one end of a VPN, and a
Cisco router on the other?  Or to put it another way, how standardized
are the standards?

Right now we have a small Cisco 1600 series router in the first
office.  It's not modular.  We haven't bought the router for the 2nd
office yet.

I'd like to use an existing computer running OpenBSD for the VPN at
the first office, possibly with an add-in crypto card, and have it
talk to a cisco router that can do the VPN in hardware at the 2nd
office.

My feeling is that using Cisco hardware to do this stuff will
be easier and more reliable, but that using existing hardware at the
first office makes more sense than buying a new router that can do the
VPN in hardware.  Even if we have to buy a crypto card to improve
performance, it will only cost us $400, which is a lot less than a new
router.

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