Category Archives: Linux

Interoperating Cisco DMVPN, Huawei DSVPN and OpenNHRP

Traditional point-to-point site-to-site VPN protocols require extensive setup in certain use cases. For example, if you want shortcuts between branch offices rather than let every packet go through the HQ, then you need to set up a cartesian product of tunnels by hand, which is time-consuming and error prone. So, people want something better, something easy to set up and maintain, and dynamic enough. While there are already a lot dynamic point-to-multipoint or full-mesh site-to-site VPN implementations (e.g. Tinc VPN, ZeroTier) on Linux, you don’t have many choices on these commercial black boxes.

Cisco DMVPN (Cisco Dynamic Multipoint VPN) is one solution to this. Huawei also had their DMVPN-compatible solution called DSVPN (Dynamic Smart VPN). Since the protocol is largely compatible, I’ll just reference it as DMVPN.

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Configure OpenVPN Server with RouterOS compatibility

RouterOS has nothing to do with security, so this article will focus on usability rather than security. All configurations related to security will be marked as optional.

First of all, let’s review all the limitations we have on the OpenVPN client on RouterOS 6.x:

  • Supported protocol: TCP (TLS mode) only, no UDP, no static key
  • Supported ciphers: none BF-CBC AES-128-CBC AES-192-CBC AES-256-CBC
  • Supported digest algorithms: none MD5 SHA1
  • Supported authentication methods: username, password and optional client certificate
  • Does not support MPLS even if running in TAP mode

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Use Linux as an MPLS Router

Two things happened in 2017:

Linux finally got native, working MPLS (L3VPN) and VRF support. 3 years later, a thorough documentation of MPLS configuration on Linux is still largely missing. Recently, after digging into all kinds of codes and documentation, I had a standard MPLS core network up and running in my lab. This article is a write-up for my lab setup.

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