Asavie Access My Lan

Remote Lan access is now a must-have, but for a small company setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) it can be an expensive and daunting task.

One answer is Access My Lan, a hosted VPN service that delivers secure and easy-to-manage remote Lan access from a PC, browser or mobile phone for a fixed monthly fee.

You don’t need special VPN hardware or a fixed public IP address to use Access My Lan. In most cases, neither do you need to make any changes to your internet router or firewall settings.

All that’s required is a small VPN agent that can be downloaded and installed on a continuously running system on your Lan.

Ideally this will be a server ­ although not necessarily ­ with support for Windows 2000, XP and Vista, and Windows Server. For this component, it took just a couple of minutes to load onto a virtual server on our test Lan.

Once this was done, we logged onto the Access My Lan website to manage our configuration. One of the first tasks is to define users and specify how they’re allowed to access resources via the VPN agent.

We started by choosing general IP access, where the remote network and its resources are made available in much the same way as via a local connection.

An L2TP/IPSec client is needed to support this, but this can be downloaded from the Access My Lan website or emailed to the user concerned. Installation is, again, very easy with no configuration required beyond typing in a Pin.

The client can be set to start automatically or on demand, needing only an internet connection plus a user name and password to set up an encrypted tunnel to the remote Lan.

Access My Lan took around 30 seconds to check our credentials before providing unfettered TCP/IP access to our test network using a mobile broadband connection.

Another option is to enable access from remote browsers. The advantage to this approach is that no special client software is required for users connecting to published applications and Webdav file shares via a custom web portal.

The portal is, again, both configured and accessed via the Access My Lan website with no need to change anything at the network end. The servers involved don’t have to be directly accessible from the internet.

Lastly, mobile users can be given access in two ways. Via an Activesync proxy, for example, users with Windows Mobile and some Nokia handsets can synchronise mail, calendars and contacts with a remote Exchange server.

In addition, full remote access is possible via a mobile Access Point Network (APN), although the latter is only available on specific partner networks (O2 and Vodafone) at the time of writing.

Management is very easy, with a simple web interface that lets you control access on a user and network basis.

Users can be authenticated directly, or via an Active Directory or Radius server with controls to limit when the service is available (by day of week and time) and provide restricted (quarantined) access if a device fails a set of pre-determined checks.

It’s not completely foolproof and, as with other VPN solutions, browsing a remote network wasn’t always as easy as we’d like. That aside, it delivered what we expected and there’s plenty of documentation to help with troubleshooting ­ plus a free trial if you want to give it a go before buying.