Drumroll, please...

You know that Windows XP megadevice I've been yammering about? First one is installed. Of course, it's still in "Testing", but I've tested it enough to realize I'm really, really going to like this thing.

First, a little background (yeah, I've talked about this before). I work for a medium sized business with a number of sites. We've got a few sites that connect via IPSec VPNs back to the main office. It seems to be becoming our primary WAN solution. It actually does work pretty well.

Also, one of my pet projects has been to get some kind of file/print server out to each branch. My clients aren't very good at saving stuff to the server, and who can blame them--saving a big spreadsheet over the WAN link is painful sometimes. Add to that the nightmare that is printer administration right now (everyone prints directly to the IP address of printers), and you can see some of the benefits of getting a server to each site.

But why put two separate devices (server and VPN router) at each site? Seems like a waste to me. I went to Snapgear, who makes a VPN router that I really like (I've mentioned it before). It's actually a device running Embedded Linux. Seems like a no brainer to me to put a hard drive onto one of these, and, with Samba, turn it into a VPN/File/Print Server. No dice--they don't seem to have any plans to do such a logical, much needed product.

So, what do I turn to? Why, that Compaq Prolinea 2266 that I started off my blog with back in August, of course! Here's what I've got:

Prolinea 2266 running Windows XP
Two NICs (had to buy some used 3com NICs--the Netgear that came in the machine didn't take to well to having a twin)
Various registry updates to turn on routing within XP
Some (still in beta) batch files that detect the internet connection, and initiate a VPN connection (using PPTP, rather than IPSec, so it's client driven)
More (also beta) batch files that will connect to a dialup failover if the main internet connection fails (and then restart the VPN)
A DHCP Relay agent, which will pass DHCP requests on the remote network to our main DHCP server, for central administration
Print queues (using the ultra cool hierarchical queuing method that I mentioned in a previous post)
File shares

In short, everything that I want (well, other than QoS support, which I'm still looking into) in one device. The hardware we already own, and the software comes to around $200 (including the XP license). About the same price I'm paying for VPN routers now.

As I have time, I'm going to post more details on how this thing works, going in order of my list above (starting with the routing registry updates). I'll even be providing batch file source code, free of charge. I'm such a guy. :)