Before you start to set up your system, you should know the networking details. I assume you have two firewalls protecting one intranet per firewall, and they are both connected to the internet. So now you should have two network interfaces (at least) per firewall. Take a sheet of paper, write down their IP addresses and network mask. You will need one more IP adresses per firewall for the VPN you want to do now. Those addresses should be outside of your existing subnets. I suggest using addresses from the "private" address ranges. They are the followings:
10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255
For the sake of example, here's a sample configuration: The two bastions are called fellini and polanski. They have one interface for the internet (-out), one for the intranet (-in), and one for the vpn (-vpn). The addresses and netmasks:
kernel: 2.0.29 Use a stable kernel, and it must be newer than 2.0.20, because the ping'o'death bug. At the time of writing 2.0.30 is the last "stable" kernel, but it has some bugs. If you want to have the fast and cool networking code introduced in it, try a prepatch. the 3rd is working for me nicely.
base system: I prefer Debian. YMMV. You absolutely don't want to use any big packages, and you never even tought of using sendmail, of course. You also definitely don't want to enable telnet, ftp, and the 'r' commands (as usual in case of any other unix hosts).
ipfwadm: I've used 2.3.0
fwtk: I've used 1.3
ssh: >= 1.2.20. There are problems with the underlying protocol in the older versions.
pppd: I've used 2.2.0f for the tests, but I'm not sure if is it secure, this is why I turned the setuid bit off, and used sudo to launch it.
sudo: 1.5.2 the newest I am aware of
pty-redir: It is written by me. Try ftp://ftp.vein.hu/ssa/contrib/mag/pty-redir-0.1.tar.gz. Its version number is 0.1 now. Tell me it there is any problem with it.
Configure your firewall rules, etc. You need to enable ssh traffic between the two firewll hosts. It means a connection to port 22 on the slave from the master. Start sshd on the slave and verify if you can login. This step is untested, please tell me your results.
Create an account on the slave firewall use your favourite tool (e.g. vi, mkdir, chown, chmod) you might create an account on the master also, but I think you want to set up the connection at boot time, so your ordinary root account will do. Can anyone point out risks on using the root account on the master?
PermitRootLogin no
IgnoreRhosts yes
StrictModes yes
QuietMode no
FascistLogging yes
KeepAlive yes
RhostsAuthentication no
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
RSAAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitEmptyPasswords no
Password authentication is turned off, so login is only possible with authorized keys. (You've turned off telnet and the 'r' commands of course).