Virtual Private Network and OpenVPN

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Feb 28, 2009

[ Thanks to linuxconfig for this link.
]

“VPN tunnels are generally considered as something
mysterious and everybody who mentions them, is “cool” 🙂 However,
there is nothing to be afraid about, in the fact principle of
Virtual Private Network is very simple.

“Data in IP networks are exchanged in packets. Information about
destination and a source of the packet can be found in the packet’s
header. The actual user data are carried as a payload. Let’s
imagine that ssh client wants to talk to ssh server over the
Virtual Private Network. Packets leaving a host’s network interface
located on the local network are sent with a destination port
number 22. When this packet reaches a VPN tunnel it is encapsulated
into the VPN packet where original packet is now treated as a
payload. If the VPN server listens on the port 443, the VPN packet
will carry a destination port 443.

“When looking at the previous figure it is apparent that this
kind of network data transfer over the VPN is a waste of transfer
rate because original packet has a smaller payload space just
because it needs to fit into the VPN tunnel packet. In VPN
analogical sense this can be considered as a drawback.”


Complete Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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