Peplink VPN Capabilities and Options

I’m trying to understand all the VPN options and finding myself a little confused. Here’s a summary of what I’m finding. I’m speaking about a Peplink Balance One here only.

1- The Peplink Balance One easily supports incoming VPNs using PPTP (which is obsolete) or L2TP with IPSec. You configure this in Network/Remote User Access, and then configure the VPNs on each device using the built-in support that most OSs have (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS…). Easy.

2- The Peplink Balance One supports two forms of network-to-network (also called site-to-site) VPNs:

2A. PepVPN which is proprietary and requires Peplink hardware at both ends, and also requires additional license fees.

2B. IPsec VPN which requires Cisco, Juniper or Peplink hardware at either end.

3- Peplink does not support OpenVPN which is an emerging and popular site-to-site VPN format.

What I want to do is set up my Peplink Balance One with a site-to-site VPN using either a popular VPN network provider (such as http://privateinternetaccess.com ) or by creating my own VPN on my own VPS (as per How to make your own free VPN with Amazon Web Services )

Am I correct that this is not possible? Or is there some software solution which would do a site-to-site VPN using L2TP/IPSec?

Apologies in advance if I’ve made any mistakes here - please help with corrections.

2 Likes

Let me help to clarify this.

  1. Correct.

  2. Correct.

2A. PepVPN is superior to IPsec and it does not require additional license fees.

2B. IPsec termination to Cisco, Juniper and Peplink hardware has been fully tested and supported.

  1. Peplink customers have successfully set up IPSec VPN connections to an AWS VPN gateway referenced below:
    AWS VPN routing issues - #6 by TK_Liew

2A. PepVPN is superior to IPsec and it does not require additional license fees.

Oh, I was confused by the UI. When you go to PepVPN settings, you first get a UI which has a “Save” button and below it talks about a “free 30 day trial”? I read this as meaning that PepVPN is not free.

But I see now that If I click “Save” (which sets the PepVPN Local ID) then afterwards the UI changes and now it looks like I can set up a PepVPN w/o paying extra, and it’s only SpeedFusion which costs extra. Makes sense now.

But I’m mostly interested in the software solution so I’ll check out that link for AWS VPN gateways, thanks!