Goals

One of the primary goals of this VPN-Solution is compatibility. There must be VPN-clients for every operating system that the company uses, so the main focus in this case is Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Additionally, handhelds should be able to connect to the VPN. The preferred solution would not require a proprietary VPN-Client, but rather utilize the built-in clients of the operating systems. As the goal of this project thesis is to use only free and open source software, the VPN services should only rely on free implementations of VPN-protocols, and operating systems.

The operating system of my choice was Linux 2.6, for several reasons:

• I know it
• I like the way, most Linux distributions deal with packages
• Linux is widely supported
• Linux is free
• You can choose between ISAKMP Daemons^1.1, and are not forced to use the BSD-Implementation, if you took a BSD, for example.
• Linux usually tries to support interoperability, whereas BSD usually doesn't care about interoperability too much.
• You can find a lot of documentation about Linux on the Internet.