I'm trying to connect to a VPN (Buffalo Technology) from home over Airport Extreme (5th Generation)

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I'm trying to connect to a VPN (Buffalo Technology) from home over Airport Extreme (5th Generation)

Hi all,

I just purchased a 5th generation Airport Extreme to replace my home router. I previously had a Linksys wireless G which gave up on me. I've got a handful of computers that will be hooked up to the router. One of them is a Windows machine and it needs to be able to VPN into work. The VPN is a product from Buffalo Technology. I don't have much further information than that right now.

When I try to connect to the VPN it connects using "WAN Miniport (PPTP)" then verifies the user name and password then tries to connect to "WAN Miniport (SSTP)." The next message is "Connecting to _____ useing WAN Miniport (L2TP)'... When I get to this step a new window pops up and shows the following error message:

Error 800: The remote connection was not made because the attempted VPN tunnels failed. The VPN server might be unreachable. If this connection is attempting to use an L2TP/IPsec tunel, the security parameters required for IPsec negatiation might not be configured properly.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I didn't have these problems on the other router when it was still in business. Thanks ahead of time for anyone who has suggestions.

Airport Extreme-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Sep 28, 2011 7:33 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

158,208 points

Sep 29, 2011 9:08 AM in response to matt104

When I try to connect to the VPN it connects using "WAN Miniport (PPTP)" then verifies the user name and password then tries to connect to "WAN Miniport (SSTP)." The next message is "Connecting to _____ useing WAN Miniport (L2TP)'...

What this is telling you is that the Buffalo VPN client is attempting to establish a secure connection to your company's VPN server/applicance using each of the common VPN connection methods. Since it was unable to establish a secure connection, its attempt to create a VPN tunnel has failed.

Typically, IPsec is used to establish a secure connection. For IPsec to work through a NAT firewall, UDP port 500 (for Internet Key Exchange IKE) & UDP port 4500 (for IPsec NAT-T) must be opened. This is offered as IPsec Passthrough on most consumer routers ... except the AirPorts. That is because, by default, they already have these ports opened for VPN as they are known as "VPN Passthrough" devices.

I would ask your work's IT for assistance on how to properly configure the Buffalo VPN client to work with your new router. It may have been configured for the earlier router and those settings may no longer apply.

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