Re: VPN over slow Internet connections

[Wil Schultz <wschultz () bsdboy com>]

On Apr 21, 2011, at 12:11 PM, Jeroen van Aart wrote:

> Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> > Well, 33.6k is a Bad Idea right there. :)  But if you're stuck with that
> > for technical reasons, but need a VPN for security reasons, it won't
> > be all *that* much worse, unless you're doing a lot of SSH or similar
>
> I would think so too. When I first moved to the States I lived in rural Oregon and used an (attempted) always on 
> dialup for years. I could mostly get a steady 56K connection, except when there was a nest of mice in the local phone 
> exchange/switch/box thing (whatever they're called) or a tree fell in the wrong place or it rained for weeks. Then it 
> would be a tad slower (the fallen tree would only cause an electricity outage ;-) the phoneline often was still 
> fine), but never go below 33.6K. Though the mice were annoying in causing a disconnect every half hour or so.
>
> Anyways, at 56K speeds 3/4 of the time and I could stream low bandwidth real audio radio and do some browsing all at 
> the same time whilst chatting. So going from that I would say that a 33.6K connection dedicated to just VPN 
> connectivity would work fine for things such as sql queries.
>
> Greetings,
> Jeroen
>
> -- 
> http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
> http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html


Assuming the slow connection, I would guess there would be some packet loss to go along with it which could make not an 
ideal situation even worse.

We've all done things we're not proud of because of business need, from the outside looking in I would definitely 
hammer home very low expectations before rolling it out. If they think it's going to be great they've got another thing 
coming, if they expect it to be barely usable they just might be pleasantly surprised. 

-wil