Site-to-Site VPN between on premise network and Azure using DD_WRT and Entware / StrongSwan – part 3 of 5

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Introduction

This is Part 3 of the series of articles about setting up site-to-site VPN between on premise LAN and Azure where you will learn how to install Entware-ng-3x.

Entware-ng-3x is a fork of Entware-ng and it uses a newer 3.x kernels to build the toolchain.

If you missed the Part 2 please check it out here:


Site-to-Site VPN between on premise network and Azure using DD_WRT and Entware / StrongSwan – part 2 of 5

Prepare USB drive

You need a USB drive with ext2 or ext3 file system. ext3 allows journaling which means more writing to the USB. I do not know how and if possible to disable journaling, so I decided to go with ext2 to minimize the write operations to the USB. If you know more about pros and cons of using ext2 vs. ext3 on a USB flash drive please, feel free to leave a comment.

  1. Use the web interface to connect to dd-wrt and enable Core USB Support, USB Storage Support and Automatic Drive Mount:


  2. Plug the USB drive to the USB 2.0 port and connect with putty over telnet (port 23)
  3. Use fdisk to see the USB drive device name and then mkfs.ext2 to format it as ext2: 
      fdisk -l
  mkfs.ext2 -L ENTWARE /dev/sda

    In this case the device is /dev/sda. use -L parameter with mkfs.ext2 to specify the label for the USB drive. You drive may already be formatted and mounted in which case mkfs will not make a file system in order to not accidentally delete any data. If you are sure you want to use this drive anyway, first un-mount it and try again.


    NOTE: I am taking these screen-shots after the fact and the IP address shown in the Putty window is different than the one we started with (192.168.29.1). I just noticed it and decided to mention it in case you were wondering.

     

  4. Restart the router from Administration -> Management -> Reboot Rooter:
  5. Go to Service -> USB and copy the UUID information from the Disk Info to “Mount this Partition to /opt”
  6. Click Save and the Apply Setting at the bottom of the page
  7. Restart the router
  8. Now the should be mounted to /opt:

 

Install Entware-ng 3x

  1. Use putty to telnet to the router
  2. Type following commands to install entware-ng 3x:cd /opt
    wget -O – http://entware-3x.zyxmon.org/binaries/armv7/installer/install_std.sh | shNote: We install the ARM version because the processor of the router is ARM. If you have a different router you should choose the binaries that match it’s processor architecture.
  3. Update / upgrade: 
    opkg update

opkg upgrade

  4. Go to Administration -> Command and save the following as startup commands:sleep 10
    /opt/etc/init.d/rc.unslung start
  5. Reboot the router

 

This concludes the installation of Entware-ng 3x.

In the next part we are going to install strongSwan:

Site-to-Site VPN between on premise network and Azure using DD_WRT and Entware / StrongSwan – part 4 of 5

 

 

 

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