Historically, only large companies could afford secure networks, which they created from expensive leased lines. Smaller folks had to make do with the relatively untrusted Internet. Nowadays, even large companies have to go outside their private nets, because so many people telecommute or log in while they're on the road. How do you provide a low-cost, secure electronic network for your organization?
The solution is a Virtual Private Network (VPN): a collection of technologies that creates secure connections or "tunnels" over regular Internet lines -- connections that can be easily used by anyone logging in from anywhere. A number of products now exist to help you develop that solution.
This book tells you how to plan and build a VPN. It starts with general concerns like costs, configuration, and how a VPN fits in with other networking technologies like firewalls. It continues with detailed descriptions of how to install and use VPN technologies that are available for Windows NT and UNIX.
Topics include:
How the VPN compares to other available networking technologies
Encryption, firewalls, and other technologies that let VPNs work
VPN configuration (sample included)
Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and Level 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP)
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animals featured on the cover of Virtual Private Networks are puffins. Puffins are small, unusual-looking birds with large triangular bills, short necks, and stocky bodies. They live in colonies, sometimes tens of thousands of birds together, along the icy shores of the northern regions of the globe. Though rarely seen outside of the northern regions, there are approximately 15 million puffins in the world today. Despite their short wings, puffins can fly, although they spend most of their time swimming or walking erect on land. While flying, they make a purring sound.
Here's some more puffin stuff: puffins' primary food sources are small fish and marine animals. They dive for fish and use their wings to swim underwater to catch them. They can carry as many as 30 fish in their mouth at one time, to bring back to shore for their young. Puffin pairs often mate for life. Usually one egg is laid per pair, and both mother and father incubate the egg and feed the young hatchling. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3, using the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use Rep KoverTM, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKoverĀ's limit, perfect binding is used.
The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Gara mond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0, and screen shots were created in Adobe Photoshop 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.
