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Wazo, LLC Network Administrators Blog > Posts > OpenSUSE 10.3 and Microsoft PPTP VPN

10/21/2007

OpenSUSE 10.3 and Microsoft PPTP VPN
I recently decided it was time to assemble a desktop computer again as I am starting to reach the limitations of my Thinkpad T60's screen and horsepower and in the process, set up a nice dual-boot WinXP/Linux machine.
 
I definitely wanted a RAID-0 configuration for speed, however I cannot use Linux LVM to create the array because of the dual-boot with WinXP requirement, so I'm stuck using the onboard nVidia RAID (nvraid) implementation. This would severely limit the distributions I am able to use. Fedora Core 7 would install but then not boot, Ubuntu 7.10 wouldn't see the array at all unless I loaded dmraid but then gParted wiped the partition table destroying everything in the process, so I was left with OpenSUSE which I heard had great nvraid support ... and I wasn't disappointed. I chose OpenSUSE 10.3 and I was pleasantly reminded why I always end up back with Suse, everything I need to do seems to work pretty much out of the box.
 
The one issue I ran into was creating a Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (Wiki: PPtP) connection to our work Microsoft VPN server. I followed all the HOW-TO guides I could find for vpnc and pptpconfig but nothing seemed to work. I eventually heard about network-manager-pptp for Ubuntu and ran across this entry in the Novell Bugzilla database with a link to a compiled network-manager-pptp rpm for Suse 10.2. I'm running 10.3, but I figured 'Why not?' I can always uninstall the rpm if it doesn't work.
 
So, without further ado, here's how I pulled it all together:
 
  1. Download and install the network-manager-pptp rpm from this link.
  2. Install it as root using rpm -ivh NetworkManager-pptp-0.6.3.cvs20060819-16.1.i586.rpm
  3. Log out and back on to restart network-manager.
  4. Click on the network-manager icon, choose VPN Connections, Configure VPN, + Add
  5. On the "Choose which type ..." screen, hit the drop-down and choose PPTP Tunnel.
  6. Connection Tab:
    1. For Type, make sure to choose "Windows VPN (PPTP)"
    2. For Gateway, put your VPN Endpoint IP Address
  7. Authentication Tab:
    1. Check Refuse EAP
    2. Check Refuse CHAP
  8. Compression & Encryption Tab:
    1. Check Require MPPE encryption
    2. Uncheck Require 128 bit MPPE encryption
  9. Optional Routing Tab:
    1. I only want to send traffic for servers on the VPN across the VPN connection, so check Only use VPN connection for these addresses and input your subnet.
  10. That's it! Just click on the network-manager icon, choose VPN Connections and then the entry you just created.
Posted at 8:58 AM by mevans | Category: Linux / Windows Integration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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