I need to make an L2TP VPN connection from a Debian Squeeze server.
What I have is:
- The server IP address
- Shared Key
- My username and password
Just using these 3 parameteres I can establish the VPN connection from my Mac OSX computer right from the Network panel in System Preferences.
To connect from Debian, after googling; I ended up with a "Openswan (IpSec) + XL2TP" solution (if you have a better alternative I can try that as well). However, connecting from Debian (by using openswan+xl2tp) involves configuring tens of parameters and unfortunately the system administrator of the VPN doesn't have any idea about the parameters I ask. He desperately claims, "it works on iphone/android/osx so it should work as well on linux." and unfortunately he is right.
What I want to ask is:
- Is openswan+xl2tp is the most simple and effective solution to use for this purpose?
- Since connection is successful from an OSX computer, is there anyone who can highlight the unshown but used parameters of OSX VPN connection? Or is there any way that I can display them?
Best Answer
We are also using a L2TP VPN connection and I could make it work on Ubuntu with openswan and xl2tp. I guess it should be similar on Debian.
It didn’t work right away, I had to play with the parameters.
It worked for me when I commented these lines:
in /etc/ppp/your_vpn_connection_name.options.xl2tpd :
Restart ipsec and xl2tp after modifying this file.
The logs on your Debian server or on the VPN server can also help to debug.