Question about VPN connection between PBXact appliances

[lonelyadmin]

I’m looking for some advice on connecting a branch office.

We have many projects going on concurrently, one of which is upgrading a small branch office phone system to be part of our main campus VOIP system (PBXact 400 v15). Original plan was to upgrade firewalls at both the core and branch, establish VPN between firewalls, then extend the voice vlan out to the branch to which their phones would connect. The firewall project has been indefinitely put on hold. Rather than wait on the firewalls, is is possible to deploy a PBXact 25 to the remote site and have a VPN terminate on the two PBXact appliances? Bandwidth and latency is not a concern, we’re good there. Poking holes in the existing firewalls and setting uo NAT/fixup/whatever shouldn’t be an issue either. I wasn’t sure if having a VPN between the two appliances was something supported.

Branch office currently has DSL and ancient analog PBX. Upgrading their circuit to anything newer with analog handoff or SIP is stupid expensive. Planning on an ethernet only handoff.

I do not currently have a VPN enabled on the main PBX for remote endpoints to connect to. Not saying we can’t go that route, we just haven’t had the need. The few remote users we have use softphone without issue.

Not sure if upgrading to v16 changes any of my options, just hasn’t happened yet.

Thanks

[dobrosavljevic (Igor Dobrosavljevic)]

I don’t think appliance to appliance VPNs are a part of the standard PBXact/FreePBX GUI. The VPN functionality is reserved for endpoints that support it.

This typically is something handled by the upstream hardware, like the firewall project that you have put on hold.

The best alternative I can think of is a TLS encrypted SIP trunk between the appliances and only allowing NAT to the devices from the respective external IPs of each endpoint.