Editing Virtual private network (section)

=== VPN support in network devices ===
Network appliances, such as firewalls, do often include VPN gateway functionality for either remote access or site-to-site configurations. Their administration interfaces do often facilitate setting up virtual private networks with a selection of supported protocols which have been integrated for an easy out-of-box setup.

In some cases, like in the open source operating systems devoted to firewalls and network devices (like [[OpenWrt]], [[IPFire]], [[PfSense]] or [[OPNsense]]) it is possible to add support for additional VPN protocols by installing missing software components or third-party apps.

Similarly, it is possible to get additional VPN configurations working, even if the OS does not facilitate the setup of that particular configuration, by manually editing internal configurations of by modifying the open source code of the OS itself. For instance, pfSense does not support remote access VPN configurations through its user interface where the OS runs on the remote host, while provides comprehensive support for configuring it as the central VPN gateway of such remote-access configuration scenario. 

Otherwise, commercial appliances with VPN features based on proprietary hardware/software platforms, usually support a consistent VPN protocol across their products but do not open up for customizations outside the use cases they intended to implement. This is often the case for appliances that rely on hardware acceleration of VPNs to provide higher throughput or support a larger amount of simultaneously connected users.