Can My Win98 Box act as a VPN Server?

I _Highly_ doubt you could run a VPN server on win9x. The OS is simply too simple to deal with real users, file permissions, access control, authentication, etc..... that is required on a login server.
Even 3rd party software would most likely only support NT because of these reasons.

I would reccommend against opening up your windows networking to the internet. The networking services in win9x are extremely easy to compromise, and you open yourself up to undue risk. The reason you can't use NetBEUI between the two remote machines is that it is (1)an unrouteable protocol and (2)not supported by the internet infrastructure. You need to use TCP/IP on the internet, or another protocol tunneled through a TCP connection.

Now, what can be done?

Use something like PCAnywhere to connect the two machines. PCAnywhere allows one machine to remotely control a second (in addition to file transfers, and all that). This is not a VPN, but more like a proxy. You can run programs on the remote server that access the LAN, and just report their results as a real-time display of the desktop.

Use a different method of sharing the disk to the internet. Some options are FTP and HTTP. Although running an internet server on a win9x box is not generally adviseable, it should work.


If you describe what kind of access you require from this system, perhaps I could suggest a different approach.

Cheers

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I have not yet begun to procrastinate.