Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Tunnel-less VPN with Cisco Group Encrypted Transport (GET) - Part1

Nowadays, the requirement for encrypted communication between business locations is part of the standard requirements from our customers. More and more regulatory laws force the use of encrypted communication.

The classic scalability issue with IPSec site-to-site encryption is that it requires each location to have a VPN to every other location. In other words, we will need N^2 tunnels defined on a network with N devices. This is obviously, a non scalable solution.

Expanding a VMWare Virtual Disk

My primary OS is Linux but I have VMWare machines with Windows and other OSes, for testing of tools and softwares.

I keep a basic installation of the Windows OS (XP, Server, etc) in a VMWare machine and keep it updated and patched. Whenever I need to do a software evaluation, I simply use a copy of the basic installation. In this way, I don't spend time re-installing the basic OS for every test.