Creating a PPTP tunnel using Monowall

Posted on by Cory Foy

A break from development a bit here, but in getting settled down into the new place, one of the things I decided to go ahead and do was use a Monowall box as my primary firewall. For years I’ve been using a Linksys Wireless router, and it’s still serving it’s purpose in Charlotte until we get the rest of the house moved up.

The biggest advantage to using Monowall for me is the ability to set up a VPN server using IPSec or PPTP. It can host the server itself, which is a nice bonus. With a PPTP VPN in place, I can connect from public access points, and still know my traffic is safe.

Setting it up turned out to be a breeze. First I hooked Monowall up with my cable modem as the WAN and my local network as the LAN. I made sure everything was passing traffic to the internet, which it was. Next, I went into the Monowall configuration screen to VPN->PPTP. The page can be broken down into four sections:

Enabling PPTP

Here you just mark that you want to enable the PPTP server. Optionally you could have PPTP connections redirected to an existing PPTP server if you have one internally.

Server addresses

Here you specify what address you want the PPTP server to use internally, and the address range you want to assign to connecting clients. In this case PPTP clients will get an IP from 192.168.0.112 – 192.168.0.128

RADIUS Authentication

If you have a radius server you want to use for authentication, you can enter that here. If not, when you finishing setting up the connection a Users tab will appear that will let you specify authentication.

Encryption

Finally, I enabled 128 Bit encryption. Since we’ll be using XP to connect, I know that 128 Bit is built in.

You’ll also notice at the bottom of that last screen shot is an important note telling you to enter a firewall rule for PPTP clients. Luckily they make this easy too. Once you’ve save the rule and added users, head over to the Firewall->Rules page and add a new rule. My PPTP rule looks like:

And that’s it! To connect to it, I simply set up a new connection using the wizard in XP, pointed it to my server, and logged in. I tested it internally (from the LAN) first, and then tried it from an outside connection.

Monowall is a great little firewall that happens to provide some great capabilities as well. If you need VPN access, hopefully this helped you get it up and running.

Happy surfing!

15 thoughts on “Creating a PPTP tunnel using Monowall”

  2. Hi Cory,

    Thank you for your great how-to. I would like to set something like this up for myself as well. I currently have a vnc connection setup which allows me to connect from work and any other place that has the internet, however I feel that it is not as secure as a vpn from my understanding of a vpn. My question is does this set up allow you like a vnc to take control of a machine and access a specific computer on your network? Secondly how do you connect from the outside world, is there specific software that must be used. Any suggestions and help is much appreciated.

    Thank you,

    Denis

  6. Thanks a lot Cory, but do you know if it’s possible to have 2 VPN’s on the same firewall ??? (i need to build 2 differents VPN toward 2 different server)

    Thank’s

    Jean Francois

  8. Hi everyone,
    Thank ypu for your tutorial, it working fine only my local network when I try to connect via internet it a little bit slow at verify username and password and show me error:619 after second
    I already forward gre and tcp 1723 port in my router

    anybody have an idea please e-mail me back
    admin@laimaiart.com

  14. Hello I followed your guide (as well as a few other guides) I just want to say everything was exact except for a few issues that were not addressed… The importance of rebooting after proper configuration. I struggled with this for a few hours thinking that the “apply changes” would suffice. After trying every combination known to man and seeing that my VPN IP was in a subnet I literally did not create a reboot showed me that it was all that was needed for everything to run like it should. I think what I am saying is a final line saying and “when all is configured reboot before testing and after every configuration change” LOL Thanks (I feel like such a newbie)

    M0n0wall 1.33 running from CD and USB stick for configuration. San Diego, CA

  15. Nice post. Very helpful. I now have a PPTP server running and have cancelled my account with StrongVPN as I’ll use this in conjunction with a dynamic DNS service.

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