How do I set up a VPN between DGND3700 and an iPad?

[JamesB1]

Hi,

I have a DGND3700 at home, and an iPad. I would like to send traffic from the iPad through a VPN to the DGND3700, primarily for privacy when using public Wi-Fi networks when travelling. I have followed the VPN wizard in the router manager, and played around with settings on both the router and the iPad, but when I try to connect the iPad (over Wi-Fi), I get "The VPN server did not respond." My router policy settings are:

Remote endpoint address type: dynamic IP address
Local LAN IP address: the same IP range that I have defined for machines in my home network
Remote LAN IP address: another IP address range
IKE exchange mode: main mode
Local identity type: WAN IP address
Remote identity type: IP address
Encryption algorithm: 3DES
SA lifetime: 3600
Pre-shared key: a strong password
Enable PFS is not checked

Within the iPad VPN config, my settings are:
IPSec
Description: a text description
Server: the public internet IP address of my router
Account: same as the description text above. I don't know where to put this text in the router config so that it can be used for authentication.
Password: same as the pre-shared key above
Use certificate: off
Group name: null
Secret: same password as above
Proxy: off

I'm reasonably good with computers, but I don't know a great deal about networks. If anyone can give me any guidance on what I should be doing, I would be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,

James.

[Dick_W]

I'm not sure you can get there from here because I don't think the DGND3700v1 uses standard L2TP. I played around with this for a long time and did a lot of Googling. Tried Win7, Vista, and three or four different versions of Android as clients. Never made it work. Found reference on the web to necessity of using (basically unavailable unless you buy a 5 client license or a "business" NETGEAR product) Netgear proprietary client software on Windows for a Windows client. When spelunking in log files on Win side, I convinced myself that IPSEC was working but the failure was somewhere in the authentication stack for L2TP.

Found reference to the ShrewSoft client but also never got there with that. (To be fair, I never spent much time on ShrewSoft and, in particular, never gave it the acid test of coming in from the WAN side with it.) Opened a case with NETGEAR Support. Never got any traction with it. They finally swapped my v1 for a v2 that doesn't have VPN support at all. (If you can't figure out how to make a feature work, remove it?) And it not having VPN support was one discussion point before I agreed to the swap.

Bottom line: I think the VPN in 3700v1 is really only for NETGEAR to NETGEAR tunnels or their proprietary client, not for the standardied VPN hosting protocols.

Oh, and the DGND3700v2 is no less buggy (though the hardware may be a better platform--but I have no direct evidence of this either).

[jmizoguchi]

Not supported ONLY with prosafe routers

[JamesB1]

OK, thanks for the responses. I'll think again.