Hi Everyone

Messing around with networking, routing and tunneling has never been my strong suite, and my main workplace recently changed their VPN to an L2TP over IPSEC solution. Obviously I need to reconfigure.

I've been looking at the various projects supporting these protocols, and feel a little overwhelmed. Until now we've used a cheesy PPP connection, and I always battled with the firewall rules and connection parameters to maintain a decent stable connection. I don't quite trust myself to get it right, and the office techs (it being a largely windows shop), can't really help.

Ideally I'd like to be able to run a little shell script to make the new connection, and until it's disabled have all network traffic go via the VPN tunnel, to ensure no data leakage. For now, there is a password, and a shared secret. I will need to access wikis running on linux webservers in-house and available on the office LAN. If I can get a terminal to my office slackware machine, then I can do most things I'll need to do from there.

Any advice / recommendations on the best packages to use, and how best to string together the protocols?

Currently I'm looking at the possibility of http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...rk/strongswan/ together with https://www.xelerance.com/software/xl2tpd/

Is this old document still relevant: http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/networking/linux-l2tp.html ?

Best regards
Feanor

Hi Feanor, I think this link should be helpful for you:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/IPsec_L2TP_VPN_server

Thanks petslack, but that seems to be mostly server-specific - I'm just trying to connect a client to a pre-existing server.

This document makes it seem reasonably straightforward, except it's not clear what files are actually being edited, and what package they belong to: http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/networking/linux-l2tp.html

It's not clear to me how far I can get without hitting slackbuilds...

Hi Feanor,
In this example they're using l2tpd but as it's dead project you can use its fork rp-l2tp (it's as simple the original). Just copy the /etc/l2tp/l2tp.conf.example to /etc/l2tp/l2tp.conf and edit it as you wish.

rp-l2tp source: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/

Personally, I prefer to use openl2tp, that's already in Slackbuilds.org.

So have you set this up to connect to an L2TP server?

If so, how did you get it working?

Do your client require certificates?

Hi rkelsen, I got it working some time ago in a Debian server and it was a simple config without Strongswan then...I didn't try to run openl2tp + Strongswan so.

If you want to take a look I put the results of a simple test that I ran today using Openl2tp in a Slackware64-Current (L2TP server) and Debian (L2TP client).

Attached Files

openl2tpd_tests.txt (9.3 KB, 24 views)

Apologies for the delays in replying... No, it doesn't.

The VPN "server" is actually a Draytek router, which I can connect to with Windows... Just looking to do the same with Slackware.

We're using a shared key.

All I have is my username, password, shared key and IP address.