VPN and VOIP

15 Apr 2007 I've skipped the VPN and VOIP research for my new laptop installation on purpose.

To fully implement my VPN wishes, I would have to install a VPN server on my desktop (even for a simple test) and setup firewall rules to test it from the outside. I prefer not to make such "drastic" changes just to test something. What I need here is a good test-setup.

For my VOIP wishes, I would need to buy an ISDN-BRI card for my desktop and a VOIP phone for my laptop. That would cost money... Besides, we plan to hire a student to do a summerproject with us involving Asterisk and VOIP.

Because the other phases are not really critical in my plans (calendar system doesn't involve much more than installtion evolution and karm, GSM and bluetooth support can't be simulated in vmware, and the desktop search engine is just a matter of installing plain beagle...), I'm looking into what support Ubuntu has for VPN.

I installed the vpnc client in my VMWare running Feisty, and to my surprise, it got integrated into the network manager applet instantly. This is what I love so much about Ubuntu: things just work.

So now that I have a VPN client, all I need to test is a server :)