atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Networking Site to Site VPN w/U-Verse

Can anyone shed advice on setting up a site-to-site VPN between two sites. Each site currently has its own U-Verse broadband service (MAX 18), and the both Residential Gateways are the same. I would like to have it so that both networks seem to be one; meaning one can browse Network Neighborhood and see PCs from both locations. If additional hardware is required, can anyone recommend a fairly inexpensive unit?

Thank You.

Any router that will do VPN tunnels is all that you need. The service provider has nothing to do with this scenario.

Marc, thanks for the reply. Do you have any recommendations on routers? Obviously nothing really high end Cisco type, but just something to get the job done. Also, will there be a problem placing these VPN routers behind the Uverse Gateway if I open the required ports?

If you are on a budget walk in to Best Buy and look at some of the Linksys business routers, if they support hardware vpn, you are good to go.

As far as browsing "network neighborhood" across subnets you will need a domain controller running DNS, this will definitely be out of your budget.

This is not required to browse directly via a known ip address, but network neighborhood typically uses NetBIOS, which is not a routable protocol.

As far as being behind the Uverse gateway, it depends on how it was setup and if it's doing any kind of authentication. The best solution is to put the Uverse gateway into bridge mode and let the new router handle the routing and authentication. If that's not possible, then most routers need to see ports 500, 4500 and 10000 opened for a VPN to authenticate.

As far as browsing other computers, the simple way around the DNS issue is to edit your hosts files. For computers on the remote end you enter the IP address of the computer followed by the name of the computer. When you ping that computer by name or try to connect to it, your computer will check your hosts file before checking the DNS server.

Example of a hosts file:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost
10.0.0.18 server
172.31.0.253 unix