Linux to IPsec VPN Hints

Owned by Christoph Lechleitner
2012-05-26

* Contents 

- Introduction 
- Links 
- Routing tips 
- Firewalling tips 


* Introduction 

This Nano-HowTo was made when connecting a Linux Gateway to a 
WatchGuard X6000 VPN appliance using IKE, IPsec, ESP, 3DES, MD5, PF2. 
The actual target was Ö-Ticket, Austria's largest event ticket company. 

Since linux kernel 2.6 introduced ipsec to the vanilla kernel ("26sec"), 
there are plenty of methods to connect Linux to an IPsec based VPN. 

This text describes how to connect to Oe-Ticket's VPN with 2 solutions: 
- isakmpd (originating from OpenBSD) 
- racoon & ipsec-tools (AKA KAME-tools) 

The hints in the tips sections would have saved me 2 long work days! 

* Important Links: 

Main IPsec-HowTo, Introduction and (too) short examples: 
www.ipsec-howto.org 
especially: 
KAME 
isakmpd 

Firewalling problems and strategies: 
IPseconLinux.pdf 

Introduction and samples in German: 
kernel-ipsec.html 

Raccoon error message decoder ring: 
www.fefe.de/racoon.txt 


* Routing Tips 

Since 26sec, you don't have a ipsec0 interface and you do not see the 
ipsec tunnel in the netstat -rn output. This sucks, but do not try to 
add weird routes! 

When having routing or even ping'ing problems, do not forget that 
traffic from the gateway itself is treated differently than traffic 
from the tunneled internal network! 

If you want to connect from the ipsec'ing, you must not use the default 
source interface (i.e. the world interface that hosts the ipsec tunnel) 
but have to use an source address within the tunneled internal network. 
Use e.g. 
ping -I 10.0.1.1 10.0.2.1 
or 
telnet -b 10.0.1.1 10.0.2.1 80 
etc. (I don't know the squid hack yet) 


* Firewalling Tips 

If you run netfilters (iptables), know these: 
- you have to accept port 500 and 4500 udp+tcp traffic (from the VPN server) for IKE key exchange 
- you have to accept -p esp traffic! (from the VPN server) to be able to receive answers 
- some TCP applications have problems with too large packets, so force down the MTU size for tunneled packets, using something like this: 
iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -d 10.1.1.0/24 -j TCPMSS --set-mss 1300

From: IBCL BLog.
Originally posted: 2006-09-21