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My company uses VPN connections to connect to and support our hardware/software on customer sites. Unfortunately among our customers there are many different VPN solutions employed, so you have to use Cisco's client to connect to one, SonicWall to connect to another.

What we'd like to do is to somehow manage all the connections from one or two machines, and route traffic through those machines to the appropriate site. That way each developer doesn't need 18 different vpn programs and configurations installed on their desktop.

Does some sort of software or hardware aggregator exist that would allow us to connect to multiple vlans and then share the connection? Has anyone tried something like this?

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    Why don't you just get a webex/gotomeeting/etc account and use that to connect to customers? That way they know when you connect and you have accountability and a way to prove you were connected and working
    – TheCleaner
    Aug 8, 2012 at 18:31
  • A good idea, but our machines at the customer sites don't have access to the internet. (I'm pretty sure webex/etc requires access to their servers) We're only allowed VPN access directly to them.
    – millejos
    Aug 8, 2012 at 22:39

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Why not setup something like Citrix, Windows Terminal Services or VMWare View, creating a session-type/VM for each connection type. That way you users could fire up an instance of whichever connect type they want and connect to that to whichever customer they need to.

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  • Another good idea, I'm looking into this right now. Some of the IPs assigned to our remote machines overlap, any idea if I could use 'Netsh add addressmapping' on the VM to NAT from a unique IP to the non-unique IP of our machine on the customer site?
    – millejos
    Aug 8, 2012 at 22:44
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Two options that might help you are a VPN client that supports every VPN endpoint or site to site VPNS. The client that can support all gateways is called TheGreenBow and you can see the full list of clients supported here:

http://www.thegreenbow.com/vpn_gateway.html

Or you could use site to site VPNs, with this you can create a tunnel between your LAN and the customer LAN and access their resources without the need for a VPN client on any computer. there's a bit of work to configuring it but once its set up you are good to go.

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Cisco and SonicWall VPN's are both IPSec-based (as are most VPNs used in the corporate world). You can interconnect them if you set up a site-to-site VPN.

We do this all of the time with our clients to avoid the same problem you're encountering. Our firewall is just a Linux box running iptables and a IPSec daemon called "Raccoon". You just have to make sure that the dozen or so different settings all match.

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