With two LanRover VPN Gateways on our network, Shiva's load-balancing feature automatically directed clients toward the VPN unit with the least amount of load. However, the load-balancing feature only works when clients are establishing their tunnels with a LanRover VPN Gateway. Once clients are connected with a tunnel, they cannot be dynamically reassigned to other VPN units. After we created a catastrophic failure on one of our LanRover VPN Gateways, our clients automatically detected the collapse of their tunnels and re-established tunnels through the redundant unit. LanRover VPN Gateway doesn't provide any application fault tolerance, however, so any application that is active when a tunnel collapses must be reinitialized.
Encryption is done at the client workstation.
We managed the LanRover VPN Gateway using the included Shiva management tools, which we ran on an NT server. Using the tools, we were able to create digital certificates with expiration dates and schedule the automatic changing of encryption keys. The management tools also allowed us to set firewall rules to reject unauthorized network traffic coming from the public side of our network. Currently, LanRover VPN Gateway supports only static routes. For the public side of our network, we connected 15 Pentium Pro clients and a Dell Computer Corp. workstation loaded with Network Associates Inc.'s NetXRay Protocol Analyzer to a Compaq Computer Corp. Fast Ethernet hub.