[Vpn-help] Help configuring Netgear FVX538 router

Matthew Grooms mgrooms at shrew.net
Sat Dec 12 13:37:23 CST 2009


Charles Buckley wrote:
> I published a couple of posts about this – I’m waiting for an escalation 
> with Netgear to go through.  It seems their customer support people can 
> just misrepresent issues they don’t understand, and their management 
> will believe it.
> 
> I don’t have time to redo the whole thing, but it is possible to get 
> this to work.
> 
> You must set up a VPN policy – mode-config doesn’t work.  This means you 
> must manually configure the VON IP address of each client that connects. 
>  This IP address must be on a different subnet than the LAN.  
> 
> The remote IP mask of he VPN policy must be set to ‘any,’ which means 
> that NetBIOS broadcasts don’t work.  All these behaviours (with the 
> exception of no mode config) also occur with the Netgear supplied client 
> (cutting Shrew out of the equation completely).  But mode-config does 
> work with the Netgear-supplied client.  Netgear are informed of this, 
> but they’ve chosen to distort and/or ignore the issues.
> 
> Those are the main caveats to getting things to work.  There may be a 
> few others – search the archives.  
> 

I don't want to downplay any incompatibility issues with the Netgear 
routers as I'm sure they are very real. However, I suspect these are 
related to changes in the Netgear firmware IKE support ( which I know is 
based on racoon ). I say this because I have a NetGear FVS338 in my lab 
running v3.0.4-19 and use it to do regular testing. The howto on our 
support site which utilizes Xauth + Modecfg was built using the FVS338 
device, which I assure you, works fine with the Shrew Soft VPN client.

When I have time, I will try to upgrade my FVS338 to a more recent 
firmware version and see if I can reproduce the modecfg problem. Until 
then, I would recommend using firmware v3.0.4-19 if its still available 
for download.

Hope this helps,

-Matthew



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