I had some issues getting the Meraki VPN to work with Ubuntu, which uses L2TP over IPsec. There is an official guide, but it just says that it doesn’t work properly with xl2tp. I figured I might a well document how I got it working.

Install L2TP

Wasn’t installed on my computer, so probably the same for yours. If you don’t run gnome, you can remove the -gnome at the end.

sudo apt install network-manager-l2tp-gnome

Configure the network

  1. Go to Settings > Network.
  2. Press the + to add a VPN
  3. Select “Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol”
  4. Add Gateway, and username and password if you wish.
  5. Click “IPsec Settings…”
  6. Add your preshared key.
  7. Make sure “Enable IPsec tunnel to L2TP host” and “Enforce UDP capsulation” are activated. Everything else should be off.
  8. Set Phase1 Algorithms to “3des-sha1-modp1024”
  9. Set Phase2 Algorithms to “3des-sha1”
  10. Press OK and then save the connection.
  11. Try to connect to the VPN, but it will probably fail.
  12. Turn off the xl2tpd service: sudo systemctl stop xl2tpd
  13. Try to connect to the VPN, and it should work.

You might as well disable xl2tpd, so you don’t have to manually turn it off after reboot: sudo systemctl disable xl2tpd.