VPN

[Sandy Harris]

Namal Perera wrote:

> We have a Sonicwall firewall in our Dubai Office and a Gauntlet firewall at
> our Abu Dhabi office. We would like to create a VPN between the 2 sites, but
> our Sonicwall vendor says that the 2 firewalls are not compatible. Please
> confirm whether this is true and if not, please advice on how we may go
> about creating a VPN between the 2 sites.

We have users of the Linux FreeS/WAN IPSEC implementation reporting success
interoperating with both:

http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.9/doc/interop.html#gauntlet
http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.9/doc/interop.html#sonicwall

This may mean your vendor is wrong and the two could be persuaded to work
together. This does not seem entirely certain, however, and I've no idea
what details you'd have to work out to get it going.

It almost certainly means that, assuming you have some Unix-ish skills
around your shop or can rent some, you could solve your problem by
putting Linux and FreeS/WAN on a spare PC and using it for one end of
the VPN.

If you have no Unix skills handy, or if they are too expensive or already
overworked, then you should likely consider getting another Gauntlet, another
Sonicwall, or perhaps one of the off-the-shelf solutions that uses FreeS/WAN:

http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.9/doc/intro.html#products

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