I switched from Mac to Linux recently and a thing I got stuck on for a while is the easy way to establish L2TP VPN connections from a mac to a Meraki firewall. On a mac it is very easy to set up, but on Linux I ran into some trouble getting it working. Now that is does work I'd thought I'd share a solution. Please note that this is a bit static and may break if future meraki updates changes cipher suite for example. Ofcourse everything Linux-related is distro-depending so this is tested on Debian 10, kernel 4.19, i3wm, since that is what I use. The firewall is a Meraki MX64. 1. Make sure network-manager is handling network connections. Read this. 2. You need the following packets (depending on WM): network-manager-l2tp-gnome network-manager-strongswan network-manager-l2tp strongswan-nm 3. Restart network-manager systemd restart network-manager 4. There is a daemon running called xl2tpd that messes up things. There's info about this on this forum. So: sudo systemd stop xl2tpd
sudo systemd disable xl2tpd 5. Create a VPN connection in nm-connection-editor and modify IPSec and PPP properties accordingly: Cheers!
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