Request for information - VPN & Routing

I admit it - I’m a bit out of my depth. Like many small business owners I fulfill multiple roles - including IT network admin. And it’s been a while since I last set things up. I do remember utilizing some website examples/tutorials and the wiki - but I’m not finding what I need. If I can get this figured out I’ll probably document it myself and try to add to the wiki.

And anticipating any queries regarding relatively small hardware - the connections involved are 50Mb down and 5Mb up from the ISP so nothing extravagant that requires major processing power. Less than a dozen clients per site. I am using fasttrack at all sites.

My topology:

  • Primary office/server location with a RB750GL primary router at 192.168.0.1. LAN 192.168.0.0/24 (my network and my control)
  • Within this LAN (on 192.168.0.2) a Linux server running OpenVPN. Roadwarriors connect to this server through primary router NAT.
  • Remote secondary site with RB750GL behind external router at 192.168.1.12. LAN 192.168.1.0/24 (also my control)
  • Remote tertiary site with hAP mini behind external router at 192.168.1.42. LAN 192.168.1.0/24 (customer site - no control of network). The purpose of this router is to gain secure access to a single client which is accomplished via dst-nat on the required port.

The first step is getting an encrypted connection from the two remotes to the office. I think I’ve done that via IKEv2. The configuration is all within “/ip ipsec” and “/ip firewall” - nothing is/was configured specially in “interfaces”, “bridges”, or “ppp”. And - this works.

The next item I would like to have working is OSPF. At one time - I know it was working. And it is working now between the primary router and the OpenVPN server (running Quagga). But where I know it used to work between the primary router and the secondary site - I don’t see the routes showing anymore. Nor do I see them recognizing each other as neighbors.

So with all that said…let’s see if I can ask this right. If any of my premises are wrong please correct me.

I believe IPSEC provides a Layer 3 connection. If that’s correct - does OSPF communicate over Layer 3 (which I think for this purpose means IP’s accessible via routing)? Or is the lack of a Layer 2 connection the first problem?

I do have in my configuration, although presently disabled, EoIP interfaces and VPLS interfaces on both the primary and secondary routers. I remember creating them by following an example, and having them work, some time previously but don’t recall why I used them or why I disabled them. I have tried enabling them - the EoIP seems to link up immediately and shows a couple packets but I never see any traffic on the VPLS interface. And neither appears to do anything for OSPF.

Do I need to assign an IP to either of those interfaces to get things to work?
Do I need to add either of the interfaces to my LAN bridge?

Appreciate any responses to what are probably elementary questions. If there is a good resource for understanding these concepts I’d appreciate learning about it as well.

Is there any OSPF related information in the LOG?

None.

The answer here is OSPF requires multicast which IPSEC does not provide. So either a layer 2 tunnel needs to be established - or a simple workaround is configuring the necessary links within OSPF via NBMA to use unicast communication.