*** Disclaimer: This is not supported by Rackspace. If it blows up, we can’t help you fix it. I’ve tested it a fair bit and it seems to be working fine, however if it does not work for you, you’re pretty much on your own. I would advise thorough testing before deploying this solution to a production environment. ***
After a long hiatus from writing articles, I found something interesting to tinker with again after a customer asked about VPN, I had never tried it so my answer was “It should be possible, but I’m not sure”. Now I can say that it is definitely possible, and give you a practical setup utilizing IPSEC to hook into your sweet Cisco ASAs in your corporate networks. This was tested using two cloud networks, but it should work for cloud network to anything that supports IPSEC. You could also potentially do this with any other VPN solution, such as OpenVPN.
This guide will walk you through setting up an openswan ipsec tunnel that connects one network to another, as well as a dhcpd server to make it mostly automatic to anything on the network. Read on after the jump.