Question : Suggestions for Cicso NM modules for LRE setup

Hi,

First question: is the 3600 series the newest EOL Cisco router or are their newer older models available (if that makes sense)?

In any case, if the 3600 series are the newest EOL routers you can pick up used, I am looking for some suggestions.
I have a small business with one office in the states and one office behind the "Big Firewall" in China with three employees.

I want the China office location and the three employees homes to be sites where they can VPN into the server stateside.

The server will serve three main functions:
1. Back-up location of each employee’s drive image (2) two (2) TB drives in Raid 1 on a HP-RR 2320 PCIe "semi-hardware" card)
2. Backup vital company data, trade secrets, financials, etc(7 300 gb Raptors in Raid 6 on HP-RR 4322 hardware raid card containing encrypted partition)
3. Allow employees to remotely control the server so as to browse the free world net, download to a 600 gb raptor, and then transfer downloads after their browsing session.

The rest of the server hardware:
2 dual core (quad) PPC 2.5 CPU/s
12 GB ECC RAm
SSD Sata boot drive OWC Enterprise RE
HighPoint RocketRaid  4322 PCIe card
HighPoint RocketRaid  2320 PCIe card
Quadro FX4500 Video card(Kinda overkill here:server was once a workstation)
Two Hitachi 2 TB HDD
8 300 GB  Velociraptors
External Raid enclosure on multilane mini sas cables
Firwire 800 external Raid array (2(two) 300GB HDD)
Firewire 400 webcam
Two built-in GB Nics
Mac OS X 10.5.8 Server(Leopard)


I want to use VPN or SSH tunnel. OS X Server has these capabilities built-in but I am wondering if I can get reduce the inherent latency of a VPN connections and maybe stabilize the upload speed/jitter/latency so as to give the remote user a reasonable real time browsing experience.

I was looking at the LRE model.

What modules should I buy for both ends for a 3660 router or up? Should I bridge the two nics? Should I do any router bridging?

Thanks for all replies.

Answer : Suggestions for Cicso NM modules for LRE setup

Sorry i had forgotten that your server was a Mac and i was indeed thinking along the lines of a Windows Server.

MS Windows 2003 Std Server allows two concurrent remote desktop sessions, as well as the local console, but to run more you need a terminal server licens CAL to increase the number. I think I've seen these on a well know auction site pretty cheaply.

I know a little about UNIX  but I'm afraid that i know next to nothing about Mac OS, so I cannot advise on the aspect of licensing remote connections to it, but sound slike you know about that anyhow.

It may be worth getting another cheap PC box that runs Win 2k3 Server to  allow the remote desktop connection if the Mac box isn't going to allow that. It wouldn't have to be to sexy as it's basically just browsing the internet. In addition you can setup RDP to run over SSL, you would just have to install a SSL cert to do that, though given that you are operating over a VPN anyhow that may be overkill.

As for your servers performance, all the VPN processing would be done in the routers, and all you would have is several private network subnets connected over multiple VPNs into your home router. If i was going to put an AIM module anywhere it would be in this device given that it would be the box doing the all the VPN number crunching, especially if you were using a 3660, whcih would be up to the job and significantly cheaper than a 3725.