Wireless VPN from WRT54GL?

[Alan Dayley]

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Joseph Sinclair wrote (in part):
> ---
> It looks, from what I can find, as if the WRT CPU slows by about half running a single SSL-VPN tunnel (not unusual, SSL-VPN is a rather CPU-intensive solution).
> If you're planning to run more than 2 clients on the VPN at a time, start with the VPN in a machine between the WRT and the wired network.  The extra CPU on even a low-end machine will be far more capable of handling the SSL-VPN load than the generally overtaxed WRT CPU.
> In most cases, it's reasonable to expect each SSL-VPN tunnel to consume about 100-200MHz of CPU while in use.  This varies somewhat by type of CPU, but most specialized firewall systems that support SSL-VPN have accelerator cards just to handle the cryptographic overhead (and provide a hardware entropy source to stave off entropy starvation, a common problem with SSL-VPN's [and SSL in general])
> 
> One other point, if you're requiring an OpenVPN connection to link through the WRT, then turn OFF WEP and WPA.  They add a lot of now-useless overhead to the WRT CPU, and they can actually compromise security of the VPN tunnel.

The performance worries me so let me go down a different path.

We have a Citrix VPN server already on the internal network.  The
firewall directs connections from the Internet to that VPN server for
remote access to the internal network.  The new plan would be to do the
same on the wireless access point.

- - All connections to the wireless access point, via WPA, would be routed
to the internal VPN server.
- - If you can log into that VPN server, you are in.  If not, you go no
further.

In other words, I would want to setup the access point such that it only
routes to the internal VPN server and no where else.  Does that sound
like a reasonable plan?

Alan

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