Imagine that Avian flu comes a chirping, killer bees come a stinging, and some crucial bridges fall over so that none of your workers can get in to the office. What’s your backup plan? Where’s your disaster recovery.

This is a case for duh dah dah da (can you hear the trumpets) Captain Open Source with one of his trusty sidekicks OpenVPN.

Then again if you were a small business and just wanted your workers to have remote access then OpenVPN is also a good solution for that.

But back to the disaster… let’s say your CEO needs access to his super secret Intranet strategic management portal. What are you going to do? How are going to provide access? Let’s say a hundred of your stranded employees need access.

Get yourself any old box (well if you had a lot of users you would probably want a more decent box) install OpenVPN, create your certificates, encrypt and send the certificates and setup file to your employees. Have them install the OpenVPN client and drop the setup file into the config folder. Done. Remote Access. Free and Good. What can be better?

I’ve been working on the ‘mellerbeck guide to OpenVPN’ it will show you how easy it is!