Connecting two subnets behind NAT

Question

So here's the situation. Me and a friend wants to connect our LAN's together over our internet connections through vpn so we can access eachothers computers and devices as if they were local.

Here's our network specifications:

My network:

Subnet: 192.168.0.0/24

Internet gateway: dlink-524 (ipsec & pptp traffic pass through available)

VPN gateway of choice: openSUSE 11.4 Server

Other devices: Win7 Desktop, Wii, Android phone, Win7 Laptop, Fedora Laptop.

Friends network:

Subnet: 192.168.1.0/24

Internet gateway: Some netgear router

VPN gateway of choice: Win7 Desktop

Other devices: Win7 Desktop(2), iPad, NAS with samba, iphone, android phone.

Ideally, when this is all set up I could for instance ping my friends ipad from my android phone.

Any ideas? I tried to config openVPN (my friend didn't get it to work on his side), but I'd rather have something that doesn't require any installation on the win7 side. The natural choice then seems to be ipSEC with strongswan, but I don't know how to make that work behind my dlink router (nat makes ipsec a big mess I think).

PPTP Seems to be deprecated as well.

Answer 1

Any ideas?

The ideal way to do this is to have the routers create the VPN tunnel for you. I've done this with entry-level Cisco routers but it seems your routers don't have the ability to act as VPN endpoints.

You might check whether you can use an Open-Source Router Firmware on your routers, or consider purchasing alternative routers that do have this feature.