Tough Question (I think)

[LoneDragoon]

Hey there folks,
I have a 5 PC LAN sharing a cable connection at my place, and a buddy of mine has a similar setup at his place.

I'm wondering if there's any way to connect our "network neighborhoods" into a larger neighborhood.

I really dont know if this is possible, but if anybody out there has any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em!

Thanks

[Game0rz]

if your right next door, you can have a huge cord going across <- bad joke
but your could have him dial into your computer kind of like you do w/ the internet in a sense.

[LoneDragoon]

Ya, but that would tie up a phone line, and would really be a waste considering that we both pay for cable. Thanks anyway though

[Bouncer]

You can do this. Effectively you'd be setting up a VPN. Now, the question becomes how do you do it cost effectively.

Two considerations.

Make sure the two networks are on different internal addressing schemes.

For instance:
LAN A: 192.168.1.0
LAN B: 192.168.2.0

So that when the connection is made they are seen as being part of the same network, but different subnetworks. You'll have to do that because otherwise the router won't forward packets to the other side thinking that since it's all in the same subnet, there's no reason to forward packets at all.

Take a look at the Personal RavlinII for cable modem VPN access. You'd need one at each side of the connection. Dunno about cost, they've probably come down a bit when we were looking at them, but as I recall, they were less than 500 dollars. The devices will take care of establishing the VPN tunnel, encryption, and authentication so you don't have to install any software on any of your machines (other than some management software on one machine to talk to the Ravlin itself).

Regards,
-Bouncer-


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"Yeah Baby, YEAH!!!"

[LoneDragoon]

cool, thanks alot