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Creating a VPN-tunnel from webserver
#1

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hello,

I've been developing a a project and document management software using codeigniter for some time now. Each project is a separate industrial air-con unit which are located all over the world.

Recently the company has started adding the pco-web-cards to the units, which allows for example error-logs to be downloaded via internet. However, a VPN-connection is obligatory to access the units directly.

For the web-software I'm developing, I would need to connect to the unit and read certain information from through the web card, but struck a wall right at the beginning. How do I create a VPN connection from a codeigniter-based web-service? I'm no expert at VPN, although I have set up a few connections, but they've always been from local desktop computers.

Thank very muc in advance

Juho / Finland
#2

[eluser]johnwbaxter[/eluser]
http://www.openvpn.net?
#3

[eluser]dcunited08[/eluser]
It sounds to me like you are attempting to have a web-service (HTTP) go through VPN, is that correct? In order for you to do so, the connection will probably have to be up all the time, that or you will have to install a VPN concentrator service on each of these machines. What OS are they running? If it is *nix might I suggest ssh? How are these web-cards (I am assuming they are ethernet cards) connected to the internet (corporate network, DSL, T1)? Are these machines behind a firewall?
#4

[eluser]Mike Ryan[/eluser]
Could you describe the steps you would take to manually download the log files? And the make/model of the web card/AC device if possible? It might be better to write a script to download all of the log files and then feed them in to the database, rather than trying to achieve this within CI.

I am currently doing something quite similar - a perl script (called from cron) downloads log files from external servers at regular intervals and writes the logs to the DB.

Whichever route you choose, you will need some VPN client software to initiate the connection, a method for transferring the files (FTP/SSH/?), and some code to parse the log files in to your required format. If you post specifics about your environment I'm sure someone will come up with something more specific. Like dcunited08 says, SSH would be the perfect solution as it allows simple, secure file transfers via SCP.




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