I have become the IT bloke at work due to the fact that I know more about it than anyone else there and I was talking to the MD today about a new office we will be opening shortly and discussing our IT requirements for it.

When he said that he wanted the people in the new office to be able to connect to the server in the main office, so I said that a VPN was the way to go. I know roughly what I'm talking about but wanted some advice from you knowledge people out there. We have a company that does IT support for us but I know that they wil say we need a new server when I call them (that is their response to everything question at the moment)...

I know you can get router/firewall type thing which will act as a gateway for the VPN so that we can have a network in the new office rather than setting up machines individually but I am not sure exactly what we would need, whether we would need more hardware at both ends or just the new office.

The current plan for the new offfice is for 2 people with computers, a printer and perhaps some form of local storage (portable hard drive maybe, backed up of course), with the option of a visitor or two from the main office from time to time.

We currently run a server with windows SBS 2003 in the main office and I know there is a VPN set up for a few people who work from home.

Comments please...

You'd be best off with a couple of VPN routers and do a site to site VPN with them IMO, keeps the overhead off the server and the computers won't know or care that they're on a different network.

Draytek do plenty of affordable and good routers, try the 2810 or 2910 on for size.

what about something like this?

Officeconnect Adsl Wireless: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

I think it is the 3crwdr200a-75 model like what I have, with the latest firmware supports IPsec VPNs, you have wifi then too.

We setup this kind of thing and always use Draytek.

Vigor2820 ADSL Router, Firewall and VPN Device

2820 or 2820N (with wireless) are the current models. Decent Broadband links and static IPs are the other ingredients.

If you have an old PC or two lying about and fancy a fiddle you could use IPCop. If not, then Use a pair of routers as suggested, and I'd give another vote for Draytech, based on reputation. I'd probably use Cisco but it's expensive and harder to set up.

Having been in a very similar situation in a previous existence, you need to make sure that your ISP gives your router a static IP address. This is more common than not these days, I think, but caused me much grief a few years ago...

Yep, trying to do this with a dynamic address will be a nightmare.

Thanks for all of that useful information folks. I just need to go and talk to our IT people now...

We have a static IP for our current office and I think that two Draytek routers and static IPs looks like the easiest way to go. Our MD doesn't care how I do it as long as it just works... (and doesn't cost too much...)

1) What is your network connectivity at each site

2) What type of work will be done at the satalite site

3) What kind of data is/will be transfered to and from the satalite sites

4) Whats your budget

5) Whats the expectations

With out knowing the answers to the above, you can't realistically spec something.

I'll give you an example;

I went into sort a problem where two sites where connected by VPN over ADSL. Both sites were complaining of latency and really slow connectivy when accessing resources across the vpn. They were sold a solution based on 8meg ADSL and they thought wow this will be quick.

However what no one had told the company; is that your max transfer is determind by the upload speed of the other end. Hence with ADSL it was actually around 300kb/s, which when using things like file shares etc made it useless. So they HAD to spend more money on either going SDSL or putting in caches etc or DFS (byte level) replication.

You can't just, drop a VPN router in at each end, unless you just want to browse the internet.

If you put a SBS at the remote office, you can use ISA for the site to site VPN.

The remote office also has all the functionality that SBS provides.

E.g. access to the internet can go through ISA using the same policies as the main office, without, using the link.

The remote SBS can be administered from the main office.

yup agree with rwbaldwin, I think your going to have to think out side the box for this one, and try and keep non-essential inter site comms to a minimum.

Auroan - The satellite office will only be two people and there isn't going to be a huge amount of data transfer, currently we have a couple of people working from home and they will be based in this new office instead. They are using the VPN on the existing SBS server at the moment. They will need to access the internet but that doesn't need to go through the VPN.

In terms of the work they do they will be pretty self contained and only need to connect to the main office to upload and download documents to the main server (spreadsheets, word doc mainly) and access reference material (pdf mainly), the only other serious data usage will be email via exchange running on the main server which they do through the VPN at the moment.

rwbaldwin - the plan in the medium term will be to replace the server a the main office and then use the old server at the satellite office.

This whole thing is only planning at the moment, we haven't signed a lease for the new office and it is likely to be a couple of months or more before we move into it. The MD only looked at the place on Wednesday for the first time.

Edited 28 August, 200916 yr by trundlenut
extra info

Working on documents over a WAN link can be troublesome. Have you thought about Citrix or Terminal Server?

Working on documents over a WAN link can be troublesome. Have you thought about Citrix or Terminal Server?

There shouldn't be a need to work on anything over the link, rather they will copy it locally, work on it then copy it back when complete and/or upload new documents.

At my previous place our main server was located in Canada and we had all kinds of extra kit like a WAN optimiser

Auroan - The satellite office will only be two people and there isn't going to be a huge amount of data transfer, currently we have a couple of people working from home and they will be based in this new office instead. They are using the VPN on the existing SBS server at the moment. They will need to access the internet but that doesn't need to go through the VPN.

In terms of the work they do they will be pretty self contained and only need to connect to the main office to upload and download documents to the main server (spreadsheets, word doc mainly) and access reference material (pdf mainly), the only other serious data usage will be email via exchange running on the main server which they do through the VPN at the moment.

You've just described the situation I went into fix/improve that I explained. Good luck if you go down the "just drop a couple of VPN routers in" direction

No problems with a decent ADSL connection IME, even opening documents directly from the server.

Citrix XenApp Fundamentals would be your best bet if you could get the budget for it. It would greatly simplify management of the remote site and the security model. I just doubt it's going to be cost-effective for less than 5 users. Maybe I'm biased, I used to work in Citrix product development and this product was one I worked on. I do genuinely rate it though.

You've just described the situation I went into fix/improve that I explained. Good luck if you go down the "just drop a couple of VPN routers in" direction

There isn't going to be many files moving backwards and forwards really, probably only a few dozen at most per day. Most of the work will be someone pulling maybe half a dozen files from the main server, spending a few days or a week or so writing a report and then putting the completed files back onto the server. During this they may need to look at a couple of reference documents.

I'm going to discuss it with the guys who work at home currently to check this is how they are using the existing VPN. I also need to think about storing the data they are working on and making backups of it.

Initially this is probably going to be done as cheaply as possible with a view to upgrading as the new office grows. We do rather need a new server in the main office and the cost of getting a new one is a significant cost to the business.

right o, good luck

I occasionally work from home just like your users are doing at the minute, soft VPN straight to the SBS. Working with Word Docs, PDFs and Excel files, it takes maybe a maximum of 10 seconds to open a document compared to 2 or 3 in the office.

Obviously if you are working on CAD files or any large files you may have to look at a more expensive solution but a couple of £150 routers are your best starting point.

Wanna run some IP phones over that link too?

IMHO I'd say go with ZyXel for office to office VPN links over draytek, but that's just my personal experience.

If you want decent reliability, on demand connection opening without the user having to do things and generally better performance, without hitting the server, then the two routers is a much better way of doing it.