[nylug-talk] Linux alternative to ISA server

[Miguel Gonzalez Castaños]

Hi all,

  In our corporate network We have an ISA server running as our 
corporate firewall and VPN server for about 50 employees onsite and 7 
offsite permanently, although around 40-60% of people make extensive use 
of VPN while they are in meetings or in off hours.

  The current server is a HP Proliant DL 320 G3 with about 18 Gb of SCSI 
drive and 1.7 Gb of RAM and a Pentium III

  The overall impression is that our VPN is slow and the idea was to 
replace the server with a bigger one. But I'm really concerned that is 
not a very fault tolerant way, since We only have one VPN/Firewall server.

  I've researched a little bit and I found this:

  http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/networking/freeswan-l2tp.html

  So apparently We could have a setup similar of VPN and let people not 
worry of changes of VPN clients (We use the default VPN clients). My 
concern is that we wanted also Active Directory integration and I think 
It'd be nice and load balancing options, so We could keep both machines 
and still be able to work if any of the two machines go down.

  The important thing here it would be to be able to manage the 
redirection rules easily (maybe a web manager?) and integrate the users 
in the AD structure so We won't have to be creating local users in our 
Firewall.

  I know this is still too vague, but I'd need some rough ideas and 
someone pointing in the right direction

  Miguel