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I have a Linksys WRT110 router & an ASUS SuperSpeedN RT-N12 router.

Will either of these — possibly with my putting on third-party firmware — support VPNs? By that, I mean, by creating the VPN, not just mapping ports, etc.

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You can set up VPN between two routers if both of them have appropriate software support. Some business class routers do have integrated VPN servers (for example Netgear FVG 318 and Cisco ASA 5505).

As for consumer routers, they usually don't have direct support, but third party firmwares can be used to make is available. For example OpenWRT has support for OpenVPN. Here's an article about it.

I'm pretty much sure that other free firmwares have VPN support too. Here's an article about Tomato and OpenVPN. You could also use one router as VPN host and have clients connect to it.

I don't think there's support for Linksys WRT110 among third-party firmware projects.

It seems that DD-WRT supports the RT-N12 router, so you can configure that one. Here's an article about DD-WRT and OpenVPN. Here's a thread about RT-N12 on OpenWRT.

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Hell, yeah! This is exactly what I’m looking for. – Alan H. Jan 12 '11 at 3:48
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I wish. VPNs are not unlike web servers because a VPN is a server-client thing. That is, there is at least one server and at least one client involved.

There aren't really any dedicated VPN servers in routers because the companies that need VPNs in the first place will need them en masse in large server farms and hence the small stuff is not of interest.

What you can do is grab computing time from Amazon's EC2 service to build a VPN on their cloud, or run VPN software on your computer. Not the answer you're looking for, unfortunately.

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Indeed, thanks. “There aren't really any dedicated VPN servers in routers because the companies that need VPNs in the first place will need them en masse in large server farms and hence the small stuff is not of interest.” But a private VPN benefits consumers (and small business), as well; e.g. to evade Firesheep or access a personal media/file server, etc. – Alan H. Jan 12 '11 at 1:59
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-1 for incorrect response! There are routers with VPN servers. For example I have Netgear FVG 318 which has a VPN server which can be used to connect to another router or receive connections from clients. Another device which I know for sure has a VPN server is Cisco ASA 5505. Many free firmwares can be used to create VPN using OpenVPN for example. – AndrejaKo Jan 12 '11 at 3:23
I have a Billion router with built in VPN capability. It's an extremely difficult thing to make it work, though. – quickly_now Jan 12 '11 at 3:43
@AndrejaKo Duly noted, but models you mention are advertised as firewalls, not routers. – digitxp Jan 12 '11 at 22:09
Looks like they are. Still, there's the point about third-party firmwares for routers which still stands. – AndrejaKo Jan 12 '11 at 22:57

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