Installing Poptop (pptpd) VPN Server on CentOS 6

By Leo Gaggl

June 14, 2012

For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link.

Installation

I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates

sudo rpm --import http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-PPTP sudo rpm -Uvh http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/rhel6/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm sudo yum install ppp pptpd -y

Configuration

Note: replace $USERNAME and $PASSWORD with actual values

IP configuration
echo "localip 192.168.0.1" >> /etc/pptpd.conf echo "remoteip 192.168.0.100-199" >> /etc/pptpd.conf

DNS configuration
echo "ms-dns 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/ppp/options.pptpd echo "ms-dns 4.2.2.1" >> /etc/ppp/options.pptpd

Authentication configuration
echo "$USERNAME pptpd $PASSWORD *" >> /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

Firewall config
service iptables start echo "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf sysctl -p echo "iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE" >> /etc/rc.local iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE service iptables restart service iptables save chkconfig iptables on

Start ppptd
chkconfig pptpd on service pptpd start