NetMAX Newsletter - November 2007

1. [Support] Holiday Hours
2. [Support] Using VPN Clients Behind a NAT Gateway
3. [General] Let's Hear From You

1. Holiday Hours

It's the holiday time of year, and we here at NetMAX would like to wish you a happy Thanksgiving! Like many folks, we here at NetMAX will be spending Thanksgiving with our families, which means that NetMAX Support will be closed on Thursday, November 22nd and Friday, November 23rd. Online help will continue to be available during this time, and our technical support number will still be accepting support messages over the holiday weekend, but immediate live phone support will be temporarily unavailable.

Because of these holiday hours, any support requests or orders received after 2pm on Wednesday, November 21st may not be addressed until we resume normal support hours on Monday, November 26th.

Thanks for your patience, and have a happy holiday season!

2. Using VPN Clients Behind a NAT Gateway

This month's tech article focuses on a method for using VPN clients behind a NAT gateway.

One of the more difficult barriers in creating a VPN using IPSEC is that all participating VPN gateways must have routable public IP addresses. Sometimes this is not possible, or is very difficult.

Well, there is hope yet! By following a few general steps, most Internet gateways can be configured to pass VPN traffic through to an internal machine.

The procedure in general is this:

• "Configure the VPN gateway:"
  This involves setting up your NetMAX VPN server for incoming Roadwarrior connections, and is covered in the NetMAX Server Suite Administrator's Manual.
• "Configure the NAT gateway to pass VPN traffic:"
  This step involves setting up the NAT gateway to forward ESP traffic and UDP 500 traffic to an internal machine.
• "Configure the VPN client to connect to the VPN gateway:"
  This involves setting up your VPN client to connect to a NetMAX, which is either covered in the manufacturer documentation included with your VPN, or included in the NetMAX Server Suite Administrator's Manual if you use the SafeNet Client.

For more information on the specifics of the firewall rules needed, please access:

www.netmax.com/fom/cache/557.html

If you have questions about this procedure, or any other aspect of NetMAX, please contact NetMAX Support directly!

3. Let's Hear From You!

We would very much like to hear from you - especially about how you use NetMAX and Linux in your business, and what features we can add to NetMAX to make it better suit your needs. Please contribute your input to the NetMAX Forum at:

www.netmax.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

or to our general NetMAX contact form at:

www.netmax.com/partners/contacts.html

Let us know about your likes, dislikes, and general comments. We are especially interested in the features that you would like to see in the forthcoming NetMAX 6.0 release.

Thank you!