question regarding IPSEC Setup

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

rascal <rascal1981 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... I have two sites, one with a cisco device and one with a
> server running freebsd 7.2.  The client wants to connect the two
> sites using these devices and I am told that the best way would
> be to establish an IPSEC tunnel between the cisco device and the
> freebsd server.  The cisco is a concentrator 3000 and the server
> is just a dell poweredge 860 with 4 nics in the back running 7.2
> freebsd.  I guess my two questions are:
>
> 1.  Has anyone done this before and what are their results?
> 2.  Is setting up an IPSEC tunnel the best route for
> this or is there something else I should be looking at?
> 3.  Any tips/tricks/good sites to check on for
> setting up IPSEC on freebsd (I am currently reading
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ipsec.html
> which is pretty darn good)?

I am no expert, just a user:  my employer uses Cisco VPN for remote
access.  Last I knew Cisco had VPN clients available for Windows and
for (some version of) Linux.  There's no official FreeBSD client
AFAIK, but ports/security/vpnc seems to work well for the purpose.

I have no idea how the Cisco end is set up, but have gotten the
impression that it may involve some sort of Cisco proprietary
extensions to IPSEC.