Connecting to a Meraki L2TP VPN on Fedora 26/Ubuntu 16.04

There are many blogs and forums detailing how to generally set up the L2TP VPN Client on both Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 26.

For Ubuntu 16.04, follow this excellent tutorial: Enabling L2TP Over IPsec On Ubuntu 16.04

For Fedora 26, you just have to install the following:

dnf install NetworkManager-strongswan \
NetworkManager-strongswan-gnome \
NetworkManager-l2tp-gnome \
NetworkManager-l2tp

My main confusion surrounded understanding the particular phase algorithms used by the Meraki vpn server, see: IKE Phase.

After reading countless forums and comments, I realized I needed to explicitly set the following phase algorithms.

Phase1 Algorithms: 3des-sha1-modp1024

Phase2 Algorithms: 3des-sha1

So in Network Manager L2TP, under “IPsec settings”, it should look like this: VPN Config

So again, this will work with Meraki VPN. Other VPNs using L2TP may differ but this will be something you want to consider when setting up your vpn client.