I recently purchased a Netgear DG834 router to be used at home with a
number of macs.  The router is acting as a DHCP server and has an
airport extreme basestation attached to one of the ethernet ports to
provide wireless access to the laptops I have at home.

I would like to VPN into my network while I'm at work from my
powerbook.  I have tried to set up the VPN a number of times and
connect with the built-in VPN client in Mac OS X Tiger but despite
playing around with settings quite a bit, I can't get it to work.

I want to do this mainly so that I can access one of the macs with
personal file sharing turned on which acts as a file server.  Ideally,
I'd like to be able to access all of the computers on the network
though.

Basically, I need step by step instructions on how to configure the
DG834's vpn and then how to configure Mac OS X's internet connect to
connect to it.  If I can't use the Mac OS X client, something which
I'm beginning to suspect, I'd like to hear about alternatives; ideally
free ones.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 17 Oct 2005 18:28 PDT

Hello Pg83,

I assume you do NOT have a DG834 at work. [if you do - please make a clarification]

Based on what I read from the DG834 manual at
  http://kbserver.netgear.com/pdf/dg834_dg834b_ref_manual_03Jun05.pdf
you must either:
 [1] use two DG834s to set up the link
 [2] use the Netgear ProSafe VPN Client (Windows only...)
to use the DG834 to set up the VPN.

The alternative is to set up DG834 port forwarding to your Mac system.
On pages 4-6 through 4-9 there is a brief explanation of the
configuration screens for the DG834. You should be able to set up
ports for the key exchange (isakmp TCP / UDP port 500) and l2tp (TCP /
UDP port 1701) in a straight forward manner. [not sure if they are in
the pop up menu or not]

What I cannot tell from the documentation if this is "enough". There
are references like this one
http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/software/erx/junose53/swconfig-routing-vol1/html/l2tp-over-ipsec-config4.html
which implies you may also need to enable a "NAT Passthrough" mode to
not generate or check UDP checksums. You might get this by putting
your home Mac in the DMZ (see page 6-1 and following) but I agree with
the cautions here - it exposes your system far more than I would be
comfortable with.

Let me know if this helps so I can prepare a proper answer otherwise,
I will try digging some more.

  --Maniac