Opensuse 12.1 Fritz!box 7390 and VPN – did it

So the idea was to be able to access my Fritz!box 7390 router from the outside via VPN and to be able to do this on my Samsung NC10 which now runs solely on OpenSUSE 12.1. The Fritz!box comes with an IPSEC installed and AVM provide a bespoke VPN client (in german) for Windows7 to work with it. It isn’t that stable and it is limiting in what you can do with it. When it comes to OpenSUSE they provide nothing and you are on your own. Suggestions in comments indicated the Shrew VPN client would be the way to go. As a straight replacement on Win7 it works fine. You have to manually edit the configuration file. It is pretty simple job to cut and paste the relevent details from the Fritz!box configuration file to the Shrew file. This option only allows you to route to your home network only. Getting it to route through the Fritz!box out to the internet (which I wanted to do) is a bit more problematic. You will need to edit the Fritz!box config file and the and the Shrew file directly to alow this to happen. Anyway, after some experimentation it works.

So on to OpenSUSE 12.1. The theory says you just copy the shrew config file over and just use it in the linux client. Before that there are a couple of things you need to do. Obviously you need to install Shrew from the repository. This should bring in the IPSEC packages too. Before you even start Shrew you need to run IKE. If you want to run it automatically you will need write a script. I couldn’t be bothered so I run it from a terminal. From that point on Shrew behaves like the Windows version….. except that it didn’t. For some reason I couldn’t fathom domain numbers were not resolving to IP numbers. Shrew has the option to automatically find a DNS server and secting that did the trick. So I can now VPN through the Fritz!box to the internet using OpenSUSE. It should have been easier though. Next job might well be to get my Xiaomi MIONE phone to VPN through it.