Which tells me the router is not forwarding the correct ports. I have gone onto the port forward page on the router and forwarded vpn ports to my computer but is not working.
Can somebody tell me what i am not doing correctly? Something else i have to do? Maybe there is other ports i am also supposed to forward.
Which ports did you set up..?
On the site it says:
If the VPN server is behind a router, Port Mapping will need to be done on the router. Standard port usage is 1723 for PPTP. You might also need to configure your router for PPTP Passthrough. Port usage for IPSec is 500, 50-51. These ports will have to be forwarded to the VPN server's IP
I do not understand what Port Mapping is, or PPTP passthrough.
Can somebody please help?
Port Mapping refers to configuring the router to map incoming connections to the "external" public IP on specific TCP/UDP ports to the same (or different) TCP/UDP ports on an internal IP.
PPTP passthrough is needed because of the way PPTP is implemented. There's two "parts" to a PPTP connection. The first is the control connection, which is a TCP connection running on port 1723. This can be set up with simple port forwarding. The tricky part is the actual data stream, which is encapsulated in the GRE protocol. This is protocol number 47. Note that this is not the same as TCP/UDP port numbers. GRE is on the same protocol level as TCP and UDP. (FWIW, TCP is protocol 6, UDP is protocol 17) This will probably be limited to a single session though, but maybe you'll get lucky and the MegaPWR actually does understand PPTP.
The reason why a passthrough is needed for PPTP, is that the PPTP protocol has session numbers in the GRE header. On a normal NAT, the GRE protocol will be correctly NATed, but you would only be capable of a single session through a router without knowledge of PPTP, in the form of "passthrough." The passthrough ties the session numbers in the GRE header to a specific internal host.
The problem is likely the GRE part. I had a quick look through my MegaPWR and I couldn't find a way to do the GRE forwarding in the "Port Forwarding" section. What you might have to do, is use the "DMZ" function (Advanced -> Application -> Port Forwarding -> DMZ)
NOTE: this will forward all incoming connections (that's not specifically forwarded to some other internal host) to the host you pick for the DMZ. This might have security implications. Be careful.
The article referenced doesn't specifical state which protocol (PPTP or L2TP over IPsec) is used. If it works anything like the outgoing connections, then it probably accepts both. I don't think you'll easily get the IPsec part of L2TP over IPsec working in your setup, since Microsoft has deemed it wise to disable connecting to an IPsec server behind a NAT, as per
this note.
While we're on the topic of IPsec, in light of the above stating:
Port usage for IPSec is 500, 50-51
IPsec using IKE uses UDP port 500 for key exchange. NAT-T encapsulates the IPsec in a UDP stream on port 4500. IPsec ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) is protocol 50, whilst IPsec AH (Authentication Header) is protocol 51.
Good luck!
