[ale] Cost of freedom

[Damon Chesser]

That is a good story well worth remembering.

Damon Chesser
dchesser at acsi2000.com
damon at damtek.com

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of David Hillman
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 11:30 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: [ale] Cost of freedom

We recently got a Netgear FVS338 Prosafe VPN Firewall to as a replacement for our box that died.  Here is an account of our attempt to get the VPN working on that device.  The firewall box is housed in a LAN that we have in one of the local data centers miles from our main office.  At the office we have Windows 7 64-bit, Ubuntu and Mac OS X clients for our web development team.

Getting the FVS338 working with the Windows XP client machines was not a problem at all--the software was included on the CD.  Everything went downhill after that though.  Netgear didn't seem to have a client ready for Windows 7 64-bit machines and there weren't any official clients for Ubuntu or Mac OS X.  After some digging, I found the Shrew Soft Inc client that is supposed to work in Ubuntu and Mac OS X.  The Mac OS X client connected fine but the Linux client never did, despite having the exact same configuration.

Some more searching on Netgear's website showed there is supposed to be a client for Windows 7 64-bit machines, but you can't freely download the thing; you have to sign up and register the serial number on the device first.  However, our device was bolted to a wall halfway across town.  No thanks to that, especially when OpenVPN is a free download any day of the week.

Vowing never to go through this crap again, we remotely installed Ubuntu server, along with OpenVPN, in a virtual machine and had all of the clients happily connected in half the time it took to do the running around for that Netgear box.  Lesson learned: flexibility is key in a heterogeneous environment like ours, and open source, especially Linux, is way more flexible than anything else out there.

Why did we go with the Netgear box in the first place? Someone with control over the purse strings thought it would be easier and faster.

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