Be sure to check if the “commandline” and “icon” path are correct for you environment and also be sure to add a , either before or after your profile to make sure your JSON is still valid. A full example profile can be found here!
If there’s anything you’re like to see added or if you’ve found any bugs, please feel free to let me know in the Issues section, I’m actively trying to tackle all open Issues!
This year I’m starting with something completely non-PowerShell related for a change.
For a while now I’ve wanted to set up a VPN server at home for various reasons such as
Access to home Hyper-V lab
Secure internet access when using insecure WiFi
Access to other home resources [Synology etc]
Now I finally had some time over the holidays to play around with it, but to be honest found out that it was quite the pain, as all information I found was simply not complete as turns out. So I thought what better way to solve that problem and to document it for future reference by making a blog post on the subject 🙂
Do note that I’m definitely not an expert on networking, so
What are we working with?
Well, my network isn’t all too fancy, but for the sake of clarity here’s an overview of my network layout
I’ve created bridges for my WAN, my LAN and my Guest so I can easily assign rules/access to each part as needed.
As for the VPN connection, while I first thought about using OpenVPN, I ended up going for L2TP/IPSEC instead, as OpenVPN is not yet fully supported and configuration requirements for L2TP/IPSEC are a bit easier [no certificate requirements etc].
Ok, let’s do this!
In order to set this up, we need to first create some pre-requisites and then put them all together. For clarity sake I’ll list the required steps here:
L2TP
Create an address pool which can be used by your VPN clients
Create a VPN profile to be used by your L2TP server/users
Configure the L2TP server
Create a fixed Interface binding
Create a VPN User
IPsec
Modify the default IPsec Policy Proposal
Modify the default IPsec Peer Profile
Create an IPsec Policy
Create an IPsec Peer
Firewall
Input rules to allow L2TP traffic
Forward rules to provide LAN and Internet access
ARP
Set proxy-arp to make sure you can access your other LAN devices properly
L2TP
Create an address pool
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ip pool add name=VPN-POOLranges=172.23.0.220-172.23.0.230
Of course you should again replace your username and password by whatever you want to have here, this is the information you also need to provide when setting up the connection on your client!
IPsec
Now there are quite a few steps to be done here, but they’re all easy and self explanatory. In this section I’ll simply provide the code required for each step, everything can be found under the IP -> IPsec tab on your Winbox application
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ip ipsec proposal setdefault auth-algorithms=sha1 enc-algorithms=3des,aes-256-cbc,aes-256-ctrlifetime=00:30:00pfs-group=modp1024
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ip ipsec peer profile setdefault hash-algorithm=sha1 enc-algorithm=aes-128,aes-256,3desdh-group=modp1024,modp2048 proposal-check=obey lifetime=1dnat-traversal=yes dpd-interval=120dpd-ma
ximum-failures=5
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ip ipsec policy add action=encrypt ipsec-protocols=esp sa-src-address=0.0.0.0sa-dst-address=0.0.0.0proposal=default protocol=all template=yes group=default
Again, be sure to change the PreShared Key here, you will need this when configuring your VPN connection on your client.
Almost there! Firewall up ahead!
It’s very important to note that you should place all your newly created firewall rules ABOVE any drop rules for them to be used. Firewall rules work top to bottom, meaning that the first rule that applies to the traffic gets applied, skipping any following rule.
Input rules
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ip firewall filteradd chain=input action=accept protocol=udp port=500,1701,4500in-interface=bridge-ziggolog=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="Allow L2TP VPN"
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ip firewall filteradd chain=input action=accept protocol=ipsec-espin-interface=bridge-ziggolog=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="Allow IPsec ESP"
Forward rules
Now depending on your needs you might want to lock this down more or just do one bit and not the other [either provide access to internet for safe remote browsing or just provide access to LAN for resources], but in my case I’ve configured both
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ip firewall filteradd chain=forward in-interface=L2TP-VPNout-interface=bridge-lanaction=accept log=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="VPN to LAN"
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ip firewall filteradd chain=forward in-interface=bridge-lanout-interface=L2TP-VPNaction=accept log=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="LAN to VPN"
Now for VPN to Internet you will have the exact same setup as before, only your interface will be the WAN facing interface, in my case bridge-ziggo.
Here’s the code for both entries just in case.
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ip firewall filteradd chain=forward in-interface=L2TP-VPNout-interface=bridge-ziggoaction=accept log=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="VPN to Internet"
ip firewall filteradd chain=forward in-interface=bridge-ziggoout-interface=L2TP-VPNaction=accept log=yes log-prefix="vpn-in"comment="Internet to VPN"
Are we there yet?
Now the final thing we should do is set proxy-arp in order to properly access all LAN devices. Thanks for the help Mateusz Czerniawski!
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interface bridge setbridge-ziggoarp=proxy-arp
That’s all!!
Now I know it seems like a lot, but that’s because of the code and screenshots. Now that I look at it myself, it’s not that bad… But perhaps it can be of help to someone else now too!