Linksys VPN

Recently I have finally succeeded in setting up a VPN connection to my home network running Linksys WRV200 at its heart. Support for VPNs was one of the primary reasons I decided to upgrade from my old WRT-54GC. The other reason was the RangeBooster feature - I described it on the Headworx blog.

WRV200 is supposed to run VPNs out of the box. Unfortunately things are not so straightforward, so below are the issues I managed to solve and in the end VPNs run as advertised.

• Upgrade your firmware. At the moment I run the 1.0.24 version released on December 1st, 2006 and it works bot stable and functionally complete. The previous one I had was fairly unstable (frequent reboots required) and I could not make it working with VPNs.
  
• You need a special VPN client software. I was a bit naive to think I could use the standard Windows XP VPN connection to connect to the Linksys WRV200. It will not work. You have to use the Linksys QuickVPN application. It is available for download from the WRV200 product page on linksys.com.
• The QuickVPN application does not work with Windows Firewall. One workaround is to disable the firewall, but this is absolutely not what I would ever do. You should add the QuickVPN to the Windows Firewall exceptions list, but this is not enough. You will still not be able to connect, as there is a bug in the Microsoft code. Fortunately there is a fix available (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889527), so download and install it.
• If you happen to connect from a network running another Linksys product (like the WAP54GX in my case - we have them in our office), you may be in trouble. After upgrading my Windows Firewall I was able to connect from my notebook over the wired network, but all the attempts to connect over wireless were failing, exactly the same way as before the Windows Firewall upgrade (the QuickVPN was stuck on the "Verifying Network" message). It simply looked like the IPSec ICMP packets were being dropped again. After looking here and there I found this post on the linksysinfo.org. So if there is a WAP54GX on your way, you have to bypass it (or wait for Linksys to fix the issue).

Overall I am happy with the solution. Of course would prefer not to use a special VPN client, but hey, I can live with that :) I have no clue why the Microsoft bug has not made it into the official Windows Update system... And it is a bit frustrating to have one Linksys product blocking the feature of another Linksys product. I am sure there are many people trying to make their VPNs working. I hope my post will help...