vpn failover?

[depadua_chris]

I have a remote office that connects back to home office via vpn. Connected to that remote hub are five spokes to other remote offices; also useing vpn. If something were to happen to the remote hub then the remote spokes would be left stranded with no connection back to home office.

Is there a way to have those remote spokes detect when the home-office-to-remote-hub connection drops so that it can create a new vpn connection striaght to the home office?

[depadua_chris]

Someone please help. Even if you reply just to say that it can't be done, that'd be enough. Or maybe point me to a web page that will help.

Thanks.

[Richard Burts]

I have implemented something that with a little adapting could probably provide what you want. I have a client with many remote offices using VPN for connectivity. On each remote I configure two VPN tunnels. We chose to use IPSec VPN with GRE tunnels. Doing this allows us to run a dynamic routing protocol over the tunnel. (We use EIGRP, but any of the dynamic protocols would work.) Running the dynamic routing protocol does several thins for us: it allows us to steer traffic so that one of the tunnels is perferred (is primary) and the other tunnel is used as a backup. Also the dynamic routing protocol is the mechanism which allows us to detect when the router at the primary tunnel has failed and we should fail over to the secondary tunnel. And when the primary tunnel router comes back up the routing protocol automatically restarts and directs traffic back onto the primary tunnel.

HTH

Rick