Afrihost / Axxess Static IP address using Linux

[andre1024]

Hi,

I've managed to get the adsl static ip address provisioned by MTN on behalf of Afrihost and Axxess working on standard Ubuntu Linux.

The hint was that MTN is using Cisco VPN that requires L2TP w/ tunnel authentication (shared secret)

1. Install your favorite linux distro (I used Debian in my case)
2. Get the linux box connected to afrihost/axxess using either your existing router or create a pppoe session from the linux machine. The important part here is to not add a default route for your entire network subnet but only a route for the L2TP server (196.30.121.50). In my case the Linux server is on my NAT'd lan so I added a route for the specific IP only to my default gateway (route add 196.30.121.50 gw 192.168.0.1)
2. Install openl2tpd (http://www.openl2tp.org/) and its prerequisites.
3. Create a configuration file for openl2tpd as /etc/openl2tpd.conf as follows:

ppp profile modify profile_name=default auth_pap=yes default_route=yes
tunnel create tunnel_name=afrihost dest_ipaddr=196.30.121.50 persist=yes secret=h3lp auth_mode=challenge
session create tunnel_name=afrihost session_name=afrihost [email protected] user_password=yourpasswordhere

4. Start the service: service openl2tp start/stop/restart
5. Observe log files (in case of debian it was pushed to /var/log/syslog): tail -f /var/log/syslog
6. If successful in establishing the connection your linux machine will now have internet access through the static ip address and all you need to do now is add all the other NAT/DstNAT entries to get it live on your local network.

I'm in the process of trying to get this solution working on openwrt as openwrt can run in a virtualised environment on a mikrotik router.

If there are others who have been successful in doing this and have inputs or better ways of achieving the above please contribute!

Cheers

 

[aducci]

Really interested in this topic! my setup is very similar to yours, since I also have a mikrotik router running openwrt, and have installed openl2tp within openwrt.

I will be playing around in the near future, but please keep us posted!

 

[andre1024]

have installed openl2tp within openwrt.

Yes, and it does work but its a little messy with all the debugging error messages etc...

I tested using this pre-compiled version and it works, except for all the error messages and I have not had the time to actually check out whats going on... but it does connect. Another option would be to get openl2tpd running on a raspberry pi under raspbian....

Link for openwrt used during testing: http://openwrt.wk.cz/attitude_adjustment/mr-mips/

I also did some tests and it appears that traffic through the L2TP connection is managed in some way and not complety unshaped as configured on my Afrihost Business Uncapped account - not sure if it was coincidental or not - will need to test further at some point but time is limited... too many other interesting things to do

 

[andre1024]

Update: change mtu to 1440 - anything above this seems to cause loss of some packets.

New configuration block as follows:

ppp profile modify profile_name=default auth_pap=yes default_route=yes mtu=1440
tunnel create tunnel_name=afrihost dest_ipaddr=196.30.121.50 persist=yes secret=h3lp auth_mode=challenge
session create tunnel_name=afrihost session_name=afrihost user_name=username user_password=your.passwd