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If they only thing you're planning to run over your VPN is SSH, then yeah, it's a coin toss whether you should run a VPN or just expose OpenSSH to the internet.
by theBobMcCormick 16y ago
If they only thing you're planning to run over your VPN is SSH, then yeah, it's a coin toss whether you should run a VPN or just expose OpenSSH to the internet. But if you're planning on running anything else over your VPN, then I'd wildly disagree that the two are equivalent.
Someone else already mentioned the performance advantage, but just the user convenience advantage alone would be a deciding factor for me.
- tptacek 16y agoI'm considering the security of the two programs, not the convenience --- although I think SSH is more convenient than you give it credit for.
- ams6110 16y agoYou can tunnel other protocols over SSH.
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoWell aware of that, but it can be a bit of a pain if you're tunneling more than a couple protocol or if your tunneling to more than a couple of hosts. Also, VPN let's you use the same configurations as you would if you were local to the machines, you don't have to use localhost, etc. And of course, there's also well known performance problems tunneling over SSH because you incur a double hit from the TCP backoff algorithm. Not to mention that you can't (easily) tunnel udp over SSH.... Come to think of it, there's no real comparison. SSH is a great remote shell protocol, but a shitty VPN protocol (not surprising since it's not * intended* to be a VPN protocol).