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Tunnel Through Almost Any Firewall
OpenVPN Solutions' OpenVPN
OpenVPN Solutions' OpenVPN is a terrific open-source Secure Sockets Layer VPN solution that works anywhere. I've never found a situation where the software couldn't immediately tunnel straight back to the server. I've tested OpenVPN scenarios in which the server was behind a Network Address Translation firewall and the remote user was behind a random firewall, and the product still worked without a hitch. Once I had to give a presentation to a customer, but at the last minute the customer asked me to present different details. I plugged into the customer's network, tunneled back to my server through the firewall, and quickly picked up another presentation containing the information the customer wanted to see.

Setup is straightforward; within an hour, I had a remote-access solution up and running. OpenVPN is full of options and can be overwhelming to a new user. However, all those options just illustrate the breadth of the software. In one package, OpenVPN provides almost a superset of the features in just about every other VPN software product on the market. For example, OpenVPN supports dynamic IP addresses and can read certificates and private keys from smart cards that support Microsoft's CryptoAPI. It can use virtual network drivers to create secure Ethernet bridges, uses real-time adaptive-link compression and traffic shaping to manage link bandwidth utilization, and has all kinds of clever pass-through capabilities. You can use it to push the network out to the remote machine, or to pull the remote machine into the network. I highly recommend OpenVPN—and best of all, it's free.