In just under 10 hours I took my company from no remote access to a fully functional, fully encrypted, fully kick ass VPN!  With this new ability, employees can establish a secure link from anywhere with an internet connection back to the firewalled network.  This allows them, and only them, to access their personal directories, and even their workstations.  You see the implications here?  With remote desktop abilities on all the workstations people can simply forward their desktop home and do everything they could at the office at home!  It does require a little overhead, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.  I'll test this for another day or two then employ two reasonably skilled coworkers to beta test it for me as well, by next week everyone could be using it! 

I'm going to end up writing a howto for setting up a radius server on Linux so stay tuned for that.  The radius server is a central point for authentications of all types, it can do just about every type of authentication you could imagine.  We have been (under-)using an LDAP server for usernames and passwords as well as passwd, smbpasswd auth, but it's a pain in the butt when you have to change a password.  I'm moving everything over to the single sign-on scheme and taking full advantage of LDAP's features and abilities.  The radius server just takes that one step further.  Anyway, there wasn't a lot of documentation on setup and configuration and I had some problems getting it working.  I had to read probably a thousand lines of debug messages before I found what was going wrong and I'd hate for anyone else to go through that.  The more I think about it I should probably just make a howto page and start putting all the howto's I've written over the years.  I will put the programs I've written there too since most of them might be able to help someone.  Look for that soon.