Have a look at http://pfsense.com/index.php?id=33 (the utilities section). You'll find some IPSEC tools and a smal tutorial for one of them there.

No, broadcasts won't leave the own subnet and the other end has a differnet subnetrange.

hoba, thanks for the reply. it turned out to be faulty network card on the WAN interface. Now the ipsec vpn is working flawlessly. great off-shoot of FreeBSD/M0n0wall you guys have created.

Thank you, I will try, but could someone explainds his experiences (soft and configuration (in pfsense and in the soft))?????

Not supported.

Yes, MTU was one of the first things I'v suspected, so I run MTU at 1300 almost from the start (when I installed the tunnel).
I just don't know anymore.. but I will probably end up changing hardware all together just to rule out some "issues", but if this fails,
it will left me clueless with a Dunce cap somewhere between the two peers. And belive you me - not a pretty picture.

P

It's not a good news. But many thanks for your testing.

Today, I updated pfsense to RC2h. And I made some tests and found some strange things. I hope it will help you to find the problem on IPSec at OPT1.

1. I disabled the IPSec and made below two tests, a and b.
a. DHCP on WAN and OPT1 - I can access Internet through OPT1 when I leave the LAN rule at default gateway.
b. Static on WAN and OPT1 - I cannot access Internet through OPT1 when I leave the LAN rule at default gateway. But I can access Internet after I change the LAN rule's gateway to OPT1's gateway.

2. I enabled the IPSec at OPT1.
a. DHCP on WAN and OPT1 with the LAN rule at default gateway - I cannot even see SPD on IPSec staus page.
b. Static on WAN and OPT1 with the LAN rule at default gateway - I cannot access to Internet. But I can see SPD on IPSec staus page and I found some IPSec logs that IPSec tried to establish tunnel and it failed. Below is the IPSec log.

Sep 3 02:21:57 racoon: ERROR: phase1 negotiation failed due to time up. 28cde7f46500a3aa:0000000000000000
Sep 3 02:21:28 racoon: INFO: delete phase 2 handler.
Sep 3 02:21:28 racoon: ERROR: phase2 negotiation failed due to time up waiting for phase1. ESP 210.109.xx.xx[0]->210.106.XX.XX[0]
Sep 3 02:20:57 racoon: phase1(agg I msg1): 0.102666
Sep 3 02:20:57 racoon: oakley_dh_generate(MODP768): 0.089224
Sep 3 02:20:57 racoon: INFO: begin Aggressive mode.
Sep 3 02:20:57 racoon: INFO: initiate new phase 1 negotiation: 210.106.xx.xx[500]<=>210.109.xx.xx[500]
Sep 3 02:20:57 racoon: INFO: IPsec-SA request for 210.109.xx.xx queued due to no phase1 found.

c. Static on WAN and OPT1. I changed the LAN rule's gateway OPT1's gateway - Now I can access to Internet through OPT1. And I can see SPD on IPSec status page. But I cannot find any logs that IPSec tried to establish tunnel even after I ping to remote subnet.

For more accurate test, all tests was made when WAN disconneted.

Thank you.

@Voami:

@hoba:

Otherwise the traffic won't be encapsulated into the tunnel as it doesn't match the tunnel definition.

Hmm, are you totally sure about this? I don't have any positive contrary evidence, but I successfully run an IPSEC VPN like this:

Local Net Remote Net
172.16.0.0/22 172.16.2.0/24

Even though the remote net is technically a subnet of the local net, I have had this work without issue. Note: it was not totally intentional, originally.

The next step:
–------------------
If one expanded this into:

Local Net Remote Net
172.16.0.0/22 172.16.1.0/24
172.16.0.0/22 172.16.2.0/24
172.16.0.0/22 172.16.3.0/24

Now you can send traffic bound from each remote net to another to the localnet.

This will work. Nobody said it wouldn't. If you can sum up your networks this way it will work. I have a 10 location setup running this way with 8 of the locations coming from dynamic IPs. The thing you can't do is add a static route across the tunnel.

Thanks for the tip!
I've tried serveral values in the 1400ish range and am not having much luck.
I am able to make voip calls b/t the two sites, which tells me that traffic is at least flowing in both directions.

Edited:
looks like I spoke too soon…. lowering to 1300 seems to have fixed the VNC issue.
Thanks for the tip!

Works fine for me. I would blame the problem on running in vmware maybe. I actually have configured a multi site (9 sites with dynamic IPs) to headoffice (static IP) setup today where all sites are connected through the mainoffice (traffic from site a to site b runs through the tunnels via mainoffice; site a and b don't share a tunnel). While I set up this the LANs of the firewalls were not connected but the tunnels were established automatically and stayed up. I even rebooted the mainoffice and the other machines dropped in in a few minutes. After 5 minutes the last machine joined again and everything was up and stayed up. I also have a similiar setup running since month where I have running voip through the tunnels. No issues. Please try this with some real machines.

Use the DHCP Server of the pfSense to assign the clients the pfSense as  first DNS Server and the remote DNS Server behind the tunnel as second DNS. Also if you have a WINS server in the remote LAN assign this as well. This works for me for pretty everything.

Thats really nice data to see.  Thanks for sharing!!!  Not bad at all for a 266 mhz device + vpn crypto.

Have a look at http://pfsense.com/mirror.php?section=tutorials/mobile_ipsec/

We did some IPSEC improvements in RC2 but they shouldn't affect establishing of a tunnel. I just wondered what your specs are as we had some funny effects with 64 MB RAM hardware at the hackathon where racoon exited too due to full memory but that shouldn't be the case with your boxes then.

It's only debug output.

Yep, you can.