Re: AS/400 Connectivity from Remote Sites

Tim,

We have had, for the last 6 mos or so, VPN tunnels to our London, Sydney and 
Singapore offices from BPCS 6.1.01 Mixed Mode running on an S30 in Central 
NY.  The outlying offices have xDSL connections and PIX501 firewall/VPN 
routers.  Our NJ Sales office will be coming on line next week w/ a cable 
connection and a PIX501.  The INet connection here is business class cable, 
6Meg down and 2Meg up w/ a Linux router running FreeS/WAN IPSEC (3DES).  
Green screen is fine, although London sometimes complains about slowdowns 
after 8AM EDT when the Eastern seabord, and local users, come on line. We 
have occasional problems w/ remote print queues getting stuck and these have 
to be monitored. The OLM GUI is OK but the CEF GUI is sometimes very slow.  A 
Citrix server over the INet seems to solve the later issue, though only one 
client can access at a time; not a problem for us currently.  Migration to 
v8.2 w/ its ability to access OLM and CEF Green Screen is the cure, I 
believe. As for reliability, the PIX boxen are very stable and do not crash.  
Linux never crashes.  Once when the London office lost power, I had to 
reestablish the tunnel manually.  FreeS/WAN is set ot re-key every 6 hours 
which heals most problems automatically.  It boils down to the reliability of 
your INet connection and ISP.  No CIRs on the INet, unfortunately ;^}

Good Luck,

Vince Rowe
MIS
Marietta Corp.
Cortland, NY

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 12:34 PM, TLuce@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> We are evaluating going with a VPN solution rather than our current frame
> solution for connectivity of our remote sites.  The cost is dramatically
> lower (thousands per month!), but the big question is reliability.  We are
> running BPCS versions 4.05 CD, 6.02, 6.04, and 6.1.02.  Three of these
> environments are already centralized onto one AS/400, the remaining two
> will be migrated within the next 6 months.  Note:  the sites would be
> throughout the US plus Toronto CAN and Monterrey MEX.
>
> Is anyone successfully using a VPN solution for remote connectivity while
> utilizing Client Access for green screen?  What were your experiences?
> Has anyone tried this and failed - if so, what were the issues that caused
> this solution not to work?