Re: Opinions on VPN?

[Jonathan Poole <jpoole () purefusion com>]

At 06:26 PM 4/17/99 -0700, you wrote:
>       Hi folks,
Well hello to you to!

>       Just wanted to find out what other people opinion on 'VPN' as a
> general idea? IMHO, the person who came up with the VPN idea should be
> shot, because in most cased all VPN do is create entry points into your
> network (in most cased right past the firewall and some times in the
> hear of your network). They also give admins false sence of security:
> the data is encrypted. But if 'rm -rf /' or 'cp porn.html index.html'
> command -- so what?! That command (traffic) is still there!

Depending on the type of vpn your doing, it may cause an insecure network
if you take a path in which is not essential to what your VPN should be doing.
I've been playing around with VPN's in the recent past, and finding it more
and more efficent for alot of things.  Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert on
this subject, and still learning the pace of it.  What i've done to make
sure the network is secure, I've setup PPPD to use a interface to talk
between two different machines.  I then run an ssh tunnel over that.
There's the security.  Once the tunnel is up, you can literally run
anything you want on the layer.  The ppp is just a tunnel, the ssh adds
security.  In what your talking about above I'm not to sure what your
useing the VPN for.  Perhaps my first post to this list was useless
information, or somewhat benifitting for your laughing needs. :)


>       Am I alone in the opinion that VPN mostly suck or is it just
> because I tend to run into a lot of misconfigured cisco routers which
> do encrypt data, but also route packets from others into your net :(

Hey! I thought I was the only one that did that!
silly me :)


> -- Yan