[plug] Creating a vpn across a broken route

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all, just one for the archives.

Between our Dubai and Perth office we have a cipe vpn. cipe just stuffs traffic across a single udp 
port.

Occasionally our route between the two machines breaks (the local provider is incompetent) but when 
this happens I can always access my shell account at my isp in Perth (different provider).

Usually before I can cobble up a fix the routing tables right themselves and I never get it working.
This morning we had an extended outage and I managed to actually get it to work.

I took Leon's stuff from here http://www.cyberknights.com.au/doc/instant-VPN.phtml

And modified it thus.

pppd noauth 192.168.2.2:192.168.2.1 pty 'ssh brad at myisp ssh root at myoffice -p1234 /usr/sbin/pppd 
noauth notty'

Where myisp is my shell account and my office is the back end server with an ssh hole poked through 
the firewall at port xxxx (1234 for example).

Quick and dirty, but it got us our link back while the ISP this end got their shit together.

I have tried it through 3 hosts just for giggles. It's a neat solution to a nasty problem.

As always, thanks to Leon for an easily googelable solution.

Brad