About Smoothwall VPN tunnels

Note: You need a Unified Threat Management license to manage your VPNs in the Smoothwall.

To route networks together over a geographic distance you can create and manage various types of incoming and outgoing virtual private networks (VPNs) on the Smoothwall. These networks or tunnels can link device networks or individual devices across a public network, such as the Internet. For example, you can use VPNs to link multiple branch office networks together, site-to-site VPNs, or to connect mobile and home users to their office network.

Authentication

Authentication keeps your tunnels secure by identifying either end of the VPN tunnel and ensuring that it can be trusted.

Certification authorities

You can either import a certificate authority that you've leased, for example, from Verisign or Thawte, or you can create your own local certificate authority. It is just as secure but more convenient. You can only have one local certificate authority, but you can upload many other certificate authorities if you need to.

Certificates

Again, you can import certificates for your certificate authorities, or you can create your own signed certificates.

Road warriors

You can create tunnels for the most commonly deployed, well-established and open Internet standard, the IPsec (IP Security) VPN protocol, and three types of road warriors. Road warriors are what we call a VPN that replaces Remote Access Server (RAS) phone or ISDN lines. The type of road warrior VPN tunnel that you need to create depends on the platform of your devices. For example, if you only have devices using Microsoft operating systems, you should create L2TP road warrior VPN tunnels, but all the devices must connect to the same internal network. If you have no Microsoft devices, for example, your devices have macOS or Linux operating systems, you should create IPsec road warrior VPN tunnels, but you must install IPsec software on your devices and configure them to connect to the Smoothwall. Alternatively, you can create an SSL road warrior tunnel. An SSL VPN uses the TLS technology implemented in modern web browsers, so there's no need to install specific software, which means it could be easier to deploy. You can upload custom scripts for the SSL road warrior tunnel and select specific user groups to apply this to.

For an example of the various VPN configurations that you can create, see our on our knowledge base article, VPN Tutorials.