Home office with ADSL

[jdreyer77]

Hi there,

I am a bit new new to the ADSL world and need some help.

We are setting up a small office from home. 2 people need to connect from home to 1 server. Both have ADSL lines at home - how do I go about setting this up? I have read up on Telkom VPN Lite but it seems that this will not work on the www side of things - or am I wrong? Someone adviced that I should go DDNS but have no clue how it works?

Any advice?

 

[Pada]

You would have to setup DDNS (dynamic DNS) on the server side. DDNS allows you to have a hostname linked to a dynamic IP address.
DDNS is necessary, since your server's IP address changes each time that your ADSL reconnects. The DDNS client then updates the IP address associated with the hostname (eg. jdreyer77.dyndns.org). This allow you to be able to connect to jdreyer77.dyndns.org, and it would always resolve to your server's IP address.
Most ADSL routers have DDNS support for dyndns.org. If you already have your own domain name, eg. www.jdreyer77.co.za, then you could simply setup server.jdreyer77.co.za to point to jdreyer77.dyndns.org if you really don't want a dyndns.org address

Some ADSL routers would allow you to setup a PPTP VPN. The clients then have to dial the PPTP VPN connections to your server's (DDNS) hostname, which would then give them an IP address on your server's LAN IP range. It would then look for your clients as if they were on your server's LAN connection.

If they are going to be exchanging lots of data (a couple of GB per month) between the server & clients, then I would recommend to get local-only ADSL accounts (like 10GB IS Local-only for R70) if the server is hosted locally (in RSA that is), since local-only accounts are at least 5x cheaper than international bandwidth.

If your server side's ADSL router doesn't support PPTP VPN server, then you could simply host something like OpenVPN server on the Linux/Windows machine and install OpenVPN clients on your clients' PCs. They would again simply connect to your server's (DDNS) hostname.

I'm not an expert when it comes to VPN configurations over ADSL, so other people might have better solutions for you.
Could you perhaps state:
1) roughly how much data would be exchanged
2) is your server located in RSA (thus allowing your clients to use local cap)
3) do you want your clients to access the server only? or should they be able to access the Internet (like www.google.co.za, email, etc) VIA your server's ADSL connection?

 

[MidnightWizard]

VPN

I have read up on Telkom VPN Lite but it seems that this will not work on the www side of things - or am I wrong?

3) do you want your clients to access the server only? or should they be able to access the Internet (like www.google.co.za, email, etc) VIA your server's ADSL connection?

There is a difference between accessing a server remotely -- ie Branch Office and accessing from home.
and
Connecting to the Internet

ADSL is not a leased line nor is it point to multipoint ( ISDN ) so you would have to connect using a VPN.

Connecting to the Internet from there is an additional scenario.

If you took out one of those SAOL oprions you could get a SINGLE FIXED IP address (+ 15 Gig ) which would make your life a lot easier -- NO DYDNS.

I would also suggest looking at a Cisco router. ( to save hassles down the line )


MW