Ytdyklly

I'm trying to connect to my company computer, which is behind a SonicWall. The only "solutions" I found were several years old, mostly using OpenSwan (which has been replaced by StrongSwan, as far as I know), and none of them has been working (I have no clue about network settings and just tried some copy-paste stuff). I tried using this and that, but could not transfer them to my problem.

So this is what I did so far:

• installed strongswan
  


• set up the SonicWall settings I found that should work (see image below)


• tried to set up /etc/ipsec.conf and /etc/ipsec.secrets and failed

I have the following information:

• Gateway: My.Gate.Way.IP


• IP of computer I want to connect to: Remote.Desktop.Computer.IP


• Shared secret: MY%SHARED%SECRET


• SonicWall unique identifier: 123456789


• User name and password, registered in the SonicWall

Can someone show me a configuration file that might work for my environment?
I tried this as /etc/ipsec.conf:

# ipsec.conf - strongSwan IPsec configuration file

# basic configuration

config setup

    # strictcrlpolicy=yes

    # uniqueids = no

# Add connections here.

conn sonciwall

    # Own IP

    left=MY.IP.IN.WLAN

    leftsubnet=MY.IP.IN.0/24

    leftid=@GroupVPN

    # Gateway

    right=MY.GATE.WAY.IP

    rigthsubnet=MY.GATE.WAY.0/24

    # SonicWall unique identifier

    rightid=@123456789

    keyexchange=ikev2

    authby=secret

    ike=3des-sha1-modp1024!

    esp=3des-sha1!

    auto=start

    aggrmode=yes

And for /etc/ipsec.secrets:

@GroupVPN @123456789 : PSK "MY%SHARED%SECRET"

# Following line was added by NetworkManager-l2tp

include /etc/ipsec.d/*.secrets

And after setting up things correctly, how can I then connect to my company computer as it would be possible with Remote Desktop on a Windows machine?

Please let me know in case I missed some important information, I will then try to add it.

Took me some time, but I finally tried the wonderful answer from @Douglas Kosovic. Unfortunately, the connection still won't set up. Installation worked fine, but I fear I miss something in the configuration.
Here is my setup from the GUI:

For ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets, see above.

According to the following page, Diffie Hellman Group 2 is modp1024 :

• https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/IKEv1CipherSuites

So the ike (phase 1) and esp (phase 2) lines should be :

ike=3des-sha1-modp1024!

esp=3des-sha1!

You might find it easier to use the network-manager-l2tp VPN GUI client which uses strongswan and xl2tpd to do L2TP/IPsec connections. Unfortunately the version of network-manager-l2tp in the Ubuntu repository won't support the @123456789 Gateway ID, so will need to build from source.

To build from source:

Prerequisites packages (note : you can safely copy and paste the shell line continuation character) :

sudo apt install 

build-essential 

git 

intltool 

libtool 

network-manager-dev 

libnm-util-dev 

libnm-glib-dev 

libnm-glib-vpn-dev 

libnm-gtk-dev 

libnm-dev 

libnma-dev 

ppp-dev 

libdbus-glib-1-dev 

libsecret-1-dev 

libgtk-3-dev 

libglib2.0-dev 

xl2tpd 

strongswan

Obtain the source code :

git clone https://github.com/nm-l2tp/network-manager-l2tp.git

cd network-manager-l2tp

git checkout nm-1-2

Configure :

./autogen.sh

./configure 

  --disable-static --prefix=/usr 

  --sysconfdir=/etc --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu 

  --libexecdir=/usr/lib/NetworkManager 

  --localstatedir=/var 

  --with-pppd-plugin-dir=/usr/lib/pppd/2.4.7

Building and installation:

make

sudo make install

You will need to logout of your desktop environment (or reboot) for gnome-shell to properly pickup the installed plugin.

In the nework-manager-l2tp IPsec Options dialog box, enable IPsec and use the following options:

• Gateway ID : @123456789


• Phase 1 Algorithms : 3des-sha1-modp1024!


• Phase 2 Algorithms : 3des-sha1!

the other options should be fairly obvious.

If you do use network-manager-l2tp, you might need to stop the system xl2tpd service, see "Issue with not stopping system xl2tpd service" :

• https://github.com/nm-l2tp/network-manager-l2tp/tree/nm-1-2