Does any­one have a good resource (I’ve seen sev­eral bad ones, but not a great ref­er­ence) that explains how to set up a free L2TP/PPTP VPN on a consumer-level OS X work­sta­tion?  I’m not talk­ing OS X server, because that ships with server out of the box with a nice GUI con­fig­u­ra­tion tool.  OS X work­sta­tion ships with the vpnd exe­cutable, but the man­page for it is a lit­tle sparse.  It seems to require an undoc­u­mented XML plist con­fig­u­ra­tion file.

The ulti­mate goal here is to get a VPN tun­nel from the iPhone to a machine at home work­ing.  From the lap­top to talk to home, I have a very hacky imple­men­ta­tion of PPTP-over-SSH imple­mented.  I’d like to have some­thing less hacky, using the vpnd exe­cutable because I can reli­ably believe that it will get secu­rity updates with OS X dot-releases, and it just seems like “the right way to do it.”

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. LJProxy: From friend-locked Live­Jour­nal posts to Google Reader
2. Win­dows Horizon
3. Audio Galaxy kicks ass!
4. Warn­ing: work­fil­ter / Warn­ing: technobabble
5. Lost Thoughts

Tagged as: iPhone, l2tp, opensource, ppp, ssh, vpn