Meraki VPN On Ubuntu/Pop_OS!
I’ve been using Ubuntu and Pop_OS! more and more for work and need to setup a VPN back to my office, which utilizes Meraki for the firewall/VPN appliance. Unfortunately, Ubuntu based distros, and probably others, do not support L2TP (Layer Two Tunneling Protocol) type of VPNs out of the box. Here’s what I did to get that working:
Software Install
Install L2TP (if you are not running Gnome, only install network-manager-l2tp).
sudo apt-get install network-manager-l2tp network-manager-l2tp-gnome
Next, stop and disable the xl2tpd service. If its running, network-manager will not be able to spawn its own instance on UDP port 1701 and will instead create a higher random port… which is not ideal.
sudo systemctl stop xl2tpd sudo systemctl disable xl2tpd
VPN Setup
Once that is done, we can setup our VPN connection. I’m using Pop_OS! 22.04 for my screenshots.
Open Network from the settings panel click the + to create a new VPN profile. You should now see a Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) option
Select that option and a new window will open. Enter the following info:
- Give the connection a name
- Enter the IP/DNS of your firewall
- Enter your username/password
Click on IPsec Settings and change the following:
- Click Enable IPsec tunnel to L2TP host
- Enter your Pre-shared Key (setup in Meraki)
- Enter 3des-sha1-modp1024 for the Phase 1 Algorithms and 3des-sha1 for the Phase 2 Algorithms
- Click OK to save
Click on PPP Settings and uncheck CHAP, MSCHAP, MSCHAPv2, and EAP leaving only PAP checked. Click OK to save.
Once done, click the Add button to save the new VPN profile.
You should now be able to connect and disconnect from Gnome Menu and the Network Settings panel.
