When I was going through a variety of routers before I ended up with the EdgeRouter Lite, I found that my connection to my work VPN would drop several times a day which became quite annoying. The connection was a standard Cisco IPSec VPN connection using the built in Mac VPN Client. I've setup VPNs before (site to site using Cisco boxes) as well as a VPN Server (OS X), so I do have some experience with VPNs. I tried to tweak settings (OS X's VPN client is built on top of raccoon) to no avail.
After I setup the EdgeRouter Lite, I tried to connect to my VPN and found that the VPN (except for 1 day) remained connected for the entire day! This was great news and is likely due to how the router handles NAT. For people that work from home, maintaining a connection to a VPN is absolutely vital. Some router manufacturers might not care much about this as they figure that home users don't use VPNs; this is an oversight that I'm glad the enterprise grade EdgeRouter Lite handles well.
Yet another reason that I'm pleased with the EdgeRouter Lite.
Comments
August 11th, 2015
Joshua Ochs
I have a VPN VM running today with racoon, providing a pure IPSEC VPN usable by my iOS/Mac (and presumably Android/Windows) clients. Does this post mean you’ve replicated this on the EdgeRouter Lite (VPN access to the LAN from built-in clients, using pure IPSEC and no L2TP)? If so, do you mind shedding a bit more light on the process or your config file? Thanks!
August 12th, 2015
Scott Gruby
I’m using a VPN client on one of my Macs and the ERL is just doing VPN pass through. For incoming connections, I don’t have the ERL acting as a VPN server, but could easily setup my Mac Mini to act as the VPN server and port forward through the ERL. I looked at setting up an IPSEC VPN on the ERL, but didn’t get too far with it. It looks possible and not a lot of work.
I found a reference at https://www.404techsupport.com/2014/01/configuring-advanced-functionality-in-the-ubiquiti-edgerouter-lite/ that has a configuration. I haven’t tested it and don’t know if it is secure, but it might be worth a look.
February 29th, 2016
Carl
The thing is VPNs are so much demanded and when their connections drop again and again it becomes so much annoying to deal with it. Your EdgeRouter Lite seems work really well. I have been facing same problem with my VPN connection. I guess I should give it a try too.
April 27th, 2016
Guillem
Hi, I have the edge router Poe 5 and I want to connect to the VPN situated in the office.
I have the ISP connected in eth1 and a laptop in eth2. The ISP provides laptop with connectivity to internet and works fine but when I set up a vpn connection in the laptop pointing to the server ip address situated in the office and write the user and password configurated in, it shows me the next error: Error 691, the combination of user and password especified wasn’t recognised or the authentiaction protocol marked is not permited in the remote access server.
Should I have to configure anything in the portal of the edgeRouter or that has to work without configuring edgerouter?
April 27th, 2016
Scott Gruby
That sounds like a VPN issue and not one caused by the EdgeRouter; the EdgeRouter should just pass the traffic, but each VPN is different, so I’m not sure.
May 4th, 2016
Guillem
Thanks Scott I will advise to my box to revise the configuration of the vpn server because it’s not possible to happen that.. Maybe he didn’t opened ports.
August 4th, 2016
Neal
Scott thanks for the Info.
Did you have to do anything to enable VPN passthough on the edge router?
If so could you share a link?
Thanks,
Neal
August 4th, 2016
Scott Gruby
I don’t recall doing anything special to enable VPN pass through; it just worked.
April 30th, 2018
Paul Besing
Hey Scott, a little off this topic, but I’m using a native VPN on my ER Lite, (IPSEC) to connect to my home network while overseas. One thing I have noticed is it only works after a router reboot. I can remain connected, but lets say I disconnect and try to reconnect the next day, and the router will never start the VPN….I can replicate this over and over. Restart, and it’s fixed. Any ideas? 73,
April 30th, 2018
Scott Gruby
Hi Paul,
Unfortunately I don’t have an answer for you. I’ve used both an OpenVPN and an IPSec VPN on my USG and haven’t had problems. I’d check the log to see if it indicates why the VPN isn’t connecting. Also, there may be something in the Ubiquiti forums.