Is Lion Server a good personal VPN solution?

Sorry but you need in this case the Snow Leopard Server... ;-)

Because the Lion Server doesnt has built in the VPN Config in the Serveradmin anymore...

Apple has castrated the Lion Server to minimal... also MySQL is missing, same about php and and and...

It has a reason, why the Snow Leopard Server was so expensive...

You get, what you paid for...

Huh? VPN configuration is right there in Server.app. It works fine and it will for this user without a problem.

Oh sorry... I didnt see that... before it was in the ServerAdmin and it has more functions before...

but the other things are still missing...

In order to be able to access my network I use Mac OS X 10.7 Server to be my VPN endpoint for my Macs and iOS devices. The VPN technologies that you could use are the Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) with IPSec Authentication. You have the ability to decide what IP address range to assign. From the Apple menu, select System Preferences. When the System Preferences window opens, from the View menu, select Network. Near the bottom left corner of the Network window, click the + (plus sign). In the sheet that appears, next to "Interface:", choose VPN. Next to "VPN Type:", choose L2TP over IPSec. Click Create.In the "Server Address:" field, enter your server address. To display a VPN icon in the upper right corner of your screen, leave Show VPN status in menu bar checked. You can then click this icon and select from several options in the pull-down menu, rather than having to access VPN options from System Preferences. "it works for me!"

I wish I could say that it just works for me. I just purchased an airport extreme and installed lion server. I did not find the VPN setup to be as intuitive as I would expect from Apple. So far I have tried connecting from a laptop and neither have been successful.

I have been trying to get the VPN server to respond for several days with no success on a brand new Mac Mini.

Immediately after logging into the OS I ran an OS X Lion software update, then I installed the Lion server (10.7.1).

I was able to set up the file sharing, the iCal and address book server, the web server and the Wiki without hassle from within the "server.app" and the Open Directory server and the firewall from within the server admin app (this one is part of the Server Admin Tools 10.7 that you have to download separately from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1419 – why is that, Apple?).

Also, the DNS server was put into operation to correctly translate the server name "server.mycompany.private" into the corresponding IP in my local network behind the router. What irritates me, however, is that a second local server name appears from time to time ("server.local").

It is as easy as 1-2-3 to launch the VPN server, too.

So far so good - it is running but endlessly keeps listening for connections without any success. Simply doesn't work for me with the firewall down - neither locally (in my home network) nor from the Internet. This is the /var/log/ppp/vpnd.log after connection attempts:

#Start-Date: 2011-08-31 18:39:52 CEST

#Fields: date time s-comment

2011-08-31 18:39:52 CEST Loading plugin /System/Library/Extensions/L2TP.ppp

2011-08-31 18:39:52 CEST Listening for connections...

Any ideas???

I am having the identical issue and posted a virtually identical message last night:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3300108

I don't know if I should be glad that someone else is experiencing the same problem or concerned that there is a legitimate issue.

After the Genius Bar guys at our Hamburg Apple Store had given up on this issue, I finally solved the problem - my VPN is up and running!

After re-installing both OS X Lion and Lion Server several times I realized that certain settings (apparently also for the VPN server) are kept in the invisble recovery partition that Lion installed on my Mac Mini (e.g., 'com.apple.RemoteAccessServers.plist'). They even survived a reformatting of the hard drive. Something must have gone wrong the first time I tried to set up the VPN server and the "sudo serveradmin settings vpn" command revealed that the settings survived every re-installation.

Therefore, I physically removed the hard drive and formatted it using a different Mac running Snow Leopard.

It is important not only to erase the disk but also to partition it. This might even work under Lion without having to remove the drive...

After another re-installation of OS X Lion on the clean drive over the Internet from Apple's server (pressing the command-R keys while rebooting) I did a system update and subsequently installed the Server app.

After that I was able to start the VPN server from the Server app.

Inside my local network it was then possible to connect to the VPN server from an iPad 2 (iOS 4.3.5) and from an old Powerbook G4 (Leopard), but not from a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard.

However, all clients were able to make an external connection through my Deutsche Telekom Router (SpeedPort 722V) with forwarding of ports 1701 (UDP), 500 (UDP) and 4500 (UDP) and enabled GRE and ESP protocols.

For the sake of security I have disabled (closed) all arbitrary ports of the server's own firewall while it's local network ports (192.168.x.y) are all open to enable any internal connections.

It is a serious restriction, however, that the Lion Server only offers the L2TP VPN protocol. Maybe the commercial iVPN solution is an acceptable workaround: http://macserve.org.uk/.

Regards, Björn

FWIW, my Lion Server VPN issue has been solved...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2696981?start=30&tstart=0

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