IPSEC behind CISCO Router

RouterOS General
1

Guys, I need your help here please. What I’m trying to do is to set up an IPSEC tunnel from a RouterOS behind a Cisco Router(NAT?) but I can’t seem to get this to work. Set up is like this.

RouterOS — CISCO ---- Internet(IPSEC) ----- Mikrotik

RouterOS:
LAN: 192.168.8.1
WAN: 192.168.230.246(yes this is still private)

CISCO:
LAN:192.168.230.1
WAN:x.x.x.x (some public IP)

I am a total beginner on Mikrotik environment but I have some experience in Networking but totally new to IPSEC tunneling. I wanted to create a tunnel to the Mikrotik device(our client) but its not working. Below is my config.

#RouterOS 

/interface bridge add name=BR_LOOP disabled=no
/ip firewall nat
add action=src-nat chain=srcnat disabled=no to-address=172.15.46.254/32 dst-address=172.15.0.0/16 place-before=0 comment="MUST BE FIRST RULE"
/interface ipip
add disabled=no dscp=0 remote-address=xx.xx.xx.xx mtu=1480 name=ipipTest local-address=192.168.230.246
/ip address
add address=10.1.0.22/30 disabled=no interface=ipipTest
add address=172.15.46.254/32 disabled=no interface=BR_LOOP
/ip ipsec proposal
add auth-algorithms=md5 disabled=no enc-algorithms=3des lifetime=30m name=proposal1 pfs-group=none
/ip ipsec policy
add action=encrypt comment="RouterOS" disabled=no src-address=172.15.46.254/32 dst-port=any \
    ipsec-protocols=esp level=require priority=0 proposal=default protocol=all sa-src-address=10.1.0.22 \
    sa-dst-address=10.0.0.21 dst-address=172.16.0.0/16 src-port=any tunnel=yes
/ip ipsec peer
add address=10.0.0.21/32 auth-method=pre-shared-key comment="Remote" dh-group=modp1024 \
    disabled=no dpd-interval=2m dpd-maximum-failures=5 enc-algorithm=3des exchange-mode=main \
    generate-policy=no hash-algorithm=md5 lifebytes=0 lifetime=1d my-id-user-fqdn="" nat-traversal=no \
    port=500 proposal-check=obey secret=SOMESECRET send-initial-contact=yes
-----

My questions please:

  1. Since my MikroTik RouterOS is behind a CISCO router, what port do I need to forward or how to I forward the packets going in to the local IP?
  2. How do I check peer logs?
  3. What am I missing here please?
2

I think I got the problem but not the solution yet. The IPIP tunnel is not working yet.

RouterOS — CISCO ---- Internet(IPSEC) ----- Mikrotik

RouterOS:
LAN: 192.168.8.1
WAN: 192.168.230.246(yes this is still private)

CISCO:
LAN:192.168.230.1
WAN:x.x.x.x (some public IP)

RouterOS: I assigned 10.1.0.22/30
MikroTik: I assigned 10.1.0.21/30

How do I tell the CISCO router to forward the packets to the internal IP? I cannot ping 10.1.0.21.

3

For this to work, you need to do 2 things:

  1. Set up static NAT entry on Cisco router to forward incoming UDP traffic with destination port 4500 to Mikrotik
  2. Make sure that Nat-traversal is enabled in Mikrotik’s IPSEC tunnel.

Alternatively, you can do L2TP/IPSEC tunnel which usually plays nicer with NAT, in that case you will need to set up NAT for UDP port 1701.

4

Thanks Gesha.

  1. I ran this tool the CISCO router.
ip nat inside source static udp 192.168.230.246 4500 interface FastEthernet3/0 4500
  1. At Peer, I have NAT Traversal set to no.
 0   ;;; RouterOS
     address=10.1.0.21/32 passive=no port=500 auth-method=pre-shared-key secret="SOMEPASSWORD"
     generate-policy=port-override exchange-mode=main send-initial-contact=yes nat-traversal=yes
     proposal-check=obey hash-algorithm=md5 enc-algorithm=3des dh-group=modp1024 lifetime=1d
     lifebytes=0 dpd-interval=2m dpd-maximum-failures=5

Unfortunately, I’m still not able to ping.

Alternatively, you can do L2TP/IPSEC tunnel which usually plays nicer with NAT, in that case you will need to set up NAT for UDP port 1701.

I don’t have control over the server side since they are our clients. I’m trying too make this work as much as I can with the info that they gave.

5

2 things:

  1. NAT traversal MUST BE ON on both sides, otherwise it won’t work. If remote side doesn’t have it on - just don’t bother, start setting up IPSEC on your Cisco.
  2. I am a little rusty on Cisco’s static NAT config, but it looks to me like you did a destination nat and not a source nat. I can be easily wrong though, I would recommend double-checking.
6

Static NAT on your Cisco should not be required. I’d suggest removing the rule.
NAT Traversal should be enabled (set it to YES) on your Mikrotik. Also make sure NAT-T is supported and enabled on the remote side as well. And take into account that your Mikrotik device won’t be able to be a responder. It should always be the initiator.

7

Thanks guys. I missed your post about static NAT. This isn’t a feasible option for us since we have NAT overload here.

Regarding on the NAT T enabled on remote site, it will be controlled by our client. I guess we will set this up as public IP instead. No router this time.

8

Problem solved! Thanks guys. I went ahead and assigned a public IP address for this instead.