I have been using VPN of various sorts for many years. I think there was a breakdown somewhere in communication regarding VPN terminology. A VPN client creates a VPN tunnel to comunicate between your computer and heir network. You can also create a VPN tunnel using hardware appliances. These appliances are usually routers that also support creating and maintaining a tunnel automatically.

I suspect what he means is that he wants to use hardware VPN appliances on both ends rather than a software client on your end. The advantages usually cited are that the hardware offloads the encryption and connection duties to the hardware, it allows them to easily reconfigure both ends from their end and there are some security benefits. The disadvantage is that the NICs in the computers on your network must be assigned IP addresses and masks that fit into the IP scheme required by the VPN appliance's configuration. I suspect that is what he is talking about when refering to "IP address ranges".

The way that works is a specific range of IP addresses (possibly only one address) need to be assigned to computers and appliances inside your network. The range of IP addresses used on your network cannot overlap with those on their network or any other VPN networks they connect to. If your router is already assigning IP address(es) to your computer(s) (and all other IP appliances such as printers or print servers that are on your network), this is not likely to be a problem. If you have anything (e.g. a print server) with a fixed IP address you may have to change it to fit the new scheme. If you have your own server assigning DHCP or have ICS enabled it can get more complicated.

You may or may not need to reconfigure your internal IP addresses depending on their requirements. Assuming that your VPN appliance is the one to initiate the connection, it shouldn't affect your public IP address at all, unless they want you to have a static IP for security purposes. If they want to be able to initiate the connection or want to access your router to configure it at will, you will have to have a static address externally.

Hope that helps.

...Jim

>I customer wants me to connect to their server using what he refers to as VPN tunnel instead of VFP client.
>
>He explained to me that VPN tunnel is when "the network administrators would swap IP addresses (or ranges) of the machines which will need access and set up a permanent tunnel." I don't want to sound too ignorant and ask him too many questions, so I wanted to ask the experts here first.
>
>Since he was talking about swapping IP addressed, I am not sure this would work for me. I believe that my ISP assigns an IP dynamically, that is I don't have a static IP. Would this make it impossible for me to use the VPN tunnel?
>
>Thank you in advance for any suggestion or input.