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[ben]

First off, thanks for such a useful website. It has made finding the information I need a lot easier.

My colleague is moving to Paphos in a couple of weeks, and will need reliable broadband. There is not currently a phone service, although that should be in next week. Cyta say it is close to an exchange, and that 4Mb ADSL should be fine. I suspect i-Choice is the only option, but would he be better off with netrunner or a different ISP?

One of the things we are looking to do is install an IPSEC VPN tunnel (roadwarrior works, and is fine, but for various reasons, we would like a static tunnel). In the UK we normally do this with a separate firewall device (Smoothwall, Endian etc.) and it works well. The firewall needs a static IP (either PPPoE with an ADSL modem, or a non-NAT router)

The broadband also needs to be reliable, and preferably without filtering or blocked ports etc.

With cyta, it looks like it will end up costing 200EUR a month, the office 4000 product - to get the static IPs and higher upload speed/better service(?) that you get with the office product.

Is there a better, and preferably cheaper, way to achieve this?

Any ideas appreciated!

[ben]

Just in case this is every of any use to anyone else, I thought I would report back.

We are using 4mb i-Choice, and so far it is working fine. The supplied router is the Speedtouch 585, and after a bit of playing around we were able to get this in to Bridging mode, where it gives the IP address to the firewall behind it (currently an Endian - www.endian.com) which is set up to connect with DHCP.

There is something strange going on, presumably with NAT, which has made the IPSEC tunnel more difficult to configure. The static IP that Cyta supply is a real IP beginning 213. However the IP address actually supplied to the firewall is a private IP beginning 10. Going to www.whatismyip.com shows the 213. IP, and I am able to ping that - but because the firewall does not have that IP itself, the IPSEC needed to be configured differently with certificates and only the Cypriot end initialising.

Thanks again for this invaluable website.