VPN between OSX and Linksys RV042/048
I’ve been considering a different firewall router for the home network, and am looking at the Linksys/Cisco RV042.
The unit ships with decent Windows software, but they’re silent on the issue of Mac support. From this excellent article come the instructions and three key tidbits:
- It won’t work if your Mac is behind a NAT router.
- You configure the router under ‘PPTP server’ and not VPN server.
- Enter the username/password into ‘Internet Connect’ and you’re good to go.
If you’re lucky enough to have OSX server, a VPN server is built in. I’m not.
Hmm, looks like the RV042 is ~$170 as of 6/07. Not bad. It can do 5 PPTP connections at once, which’d be fine for me. It’d be nice to be able to print from offsite sometimes, and SSH tunnels are a PITA.
June 6th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
[...] the new firewall’s [...]
July 26th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Well I know its been a long time since you posted but I’d thought I’d respond. I have been managing an office network for a couple of years and we use Xserve on osx tiger. I installed the firewall and use it to handle VPN and DHCP I also have AEBS routers behind the firewall in bridge mode and extended with Airport express routers , one in relay and others in remote mode. We also have Win XP, Vista and OS X tiger and Leopard clients. So saying all this I conclude that all is running well and air tight. The VPN works well via PPTP and we can also connect via vnc to individual computers for macs and I use windows remote connection for mac to connect to the PC’s or Windows Boxes if you prefer. The recent firmware update to the RV042 has added trend micro services as well. about the only thing I can complain about is the way the router has been handling Bonjour on the 5353 port. I keep getting a message that its blocking it and I get a synflood warning. I guess ill figure out a way around this. Thanks for posting and good luck.