[CentOS] regarding vpn server for 1500 clients

Fri Dec 19 18:59:27 UTC 2008
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org>

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 01:54:32PM -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> Ray Van Dolson wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 01:14:34PM -0500, Ross Walker wrote:
> >   
> >> On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:20 PM, Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>     
> >>> How about lots of GRE tunnels? :-)
> >>>       
> >> Well PPTP is PPP over GRE, so that's basically it.
> >>
> >> PPTP can run without encryption too if the OP really doesn't care  
> >> about encryption.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > The only thing I'll say in the world of using PPTP (via PoPToP) is to
> > consider what happens when most or all of your clients reconnect at one
> > time (network glitch, etc).  This was my biggest challenge as the
> > original configuration had PPP calling all sorts of perl scripts and
> > such from its ip-up mechanism.  The server would come to a complete
> > crawl as 800+ of these ip-up scripts would fire off along with their
> > associated tasks.  This would result in clients timing out, links
> > failing, etc -- the server could never "catch up". 
> >   
> 
> I was recommending it based on the protocol. I did mention that I have 
> limited deployment experience.
> 
> OUCH. All that perl could really kill the user experience.....
> 
> Almost as bad as a D-H exponentiation!
> 

It gets even worse... whoever had set up the system first didn't now
how to get the IP address correctly from a variable in the ip-up
script.  So what'd they do?  They called grep on /var/log/messages to
look for it.

You can imagine the fun this created.... :-)