Installing Poptop (pptpd) VPN Server on CentOS 6

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

• Centos
• Remote
• Security