archived.neilpahl.com (my old site)

Entry 1: First Things First: Bridging or Routing?

Topic: OpenVPN on Ubuntu Server Behind Firewall   

Created on Sun, 01 Jan 2012.
Last Modified on Mon, 02 Jan 2012.

When you are using an internal server to manage your intranet and LAN resources, some of the services running on on your internal server will run web-based gui's.

Sure you can access those if you open up your intranet to the world wide web but that would defeat the whole purpose of your intranet. I host company resources over our intraweb, so it would be a bad thing to open them up to the world.

Right now I setup FOG to ghost and manage PC images in a small LAN. It works great when I access the web-interface while connected to our local network, but I wouldn't be able to access this remotely.

So, I'm seting up a VPN so that I can remotely connect to the intranet resources and web-gui's. I am planing on using OpenVPN.

My internal server runs Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS and sits behind a router (firewalled router). So before setting up the VPN, I have to choose between a Routed or Bridged network.

My understanding of those two concepts are as follows:

>> Adding the Bridging configurations to my Ubuntu Server, would make my server act as a ethernet switch. When the client connects, it will recieve an IP which on the main subnet.

>> A routing configuration would create a new subnet between the Ubuntu Server and the remote client. Then, the client and server could share resources together, but not with the rest of the network.

I'm not too sure yet how this would affect internet traffic. I think the traffic in a bridged configuration would go through the intranet's router. The routed configuration may not, please comment if you know.

Having said that, In general, the bridged network is a little more powerfull, but harder to setup and for my purposes I might be able to ge away with just a routed configuration, since All my services and resources are run on the Ubunut Server.

I may just end up going for the bridged setup anyways since its 'better'.

PLEASE let me know if I'm doing something wrong, or if you have any suggestions or requests~

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