We’ve talked about sorting out a VPN connection for Sauce Employees for a long time. The main reason is that creating a AWS Security Group set up for individual employee remote IP addresses is a lot of management.
In the past we have looked at options such as Nord Layer, and Twingate, but for various reasons we’ve never progressed these.
What we’ve not really investigated before is the existing hardware we have in the office. Some of you will be aware that we have a new Dream Machine router to replace the dreaded KCOM router. We spotted that the docs talked about VPN capability, so decided to investigate it. Turns out it was really simple to set up and the security side was easy enough with some additional firewall rules tweaks.
As I already mentioned, the main reason to have a VPN is to reduce the workload for anyone to get through the various AWS security groups. We always have the office IP address in those, so getting a VPN connection in to use the IP will mean no one will be waiting on myself, or other developers to change the security group
If you need to use the SauceVPN, simply drop John or Jim an DM / email and we’ll set you up with a unique username and password.
Setting up the VPN on your machine is easy. Follow the steps under “Configuring Clients” for either Windows or MacOS and you will be connected in no time.
Remember to switch the VPN off when you don’t need it, as you’ll be on a slower than normal connection, and we don’t need to have everyone flooding the office network all the time. Basically use it when you need to connect to a database or server instance, and switch it off when you are done with that task.
When I ran a few tests, I was getting approx 40Mbps down and 70Mbps up, so it’s definitely very usable.
Developer, tinkerer, occasionally useful
