Configuring and troubleshooting a WiMAX VPN Connection

When I first joined DWU as a tutor with the Department of Information Systems, one of the biggest challenges given to me was to look after the departments practical computer lab. I have looked after computer labs in my last job with Daltron Training but with technical assistance from ICT department. For this lab we needed to have our own network setup which we will have to manage and monitor ourselves.

This has been quite a challenge for me and to get things started I had to first setup the WiMAX VPN connection. The WiMAX CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) was bought from Telikom PNG a year ago. Telikom managed to get it setup but as soon as they left everything seemed to have stopped working (at least that's what I was told). Anyway, so far the past one year they haven't been using it.


I honestly didn't know what was wrong, had a few possible problems in mind but then set out to troubleshoot from the very beginning of the entire configurations. I checked with Telikom to find out if our WiMAX account was still active and we were told it was. With the WiMAX CPE (original product from Alvarion) you can tell by the orange light on the device that it is registered and still active.


I consulted Telikom to come over to the Lab and assist me by going through the whole process of configuration. I soon realized that it was just setting up the dialer. Well all went well but this technician from Telikom couldn't get the WiMAX connection to internet working on one of our machines. It worked fine in his laptop but couldn't get it connected to our machine.

He tried a few troubleshooting tips and tricks to no avail. So we decided to call it off. I was so curious and wanted to know WHY? this connection was not working.

I went through the whole entire process again and of course had to do some research and reading on you know where GOOGLE but the solution was somewhat obscure. It came to this AHA!!! moment when I realized it must be the firewall. And that's where it all became very clear. I  decided to enable the VPN protocol Telikom used for this WiMAX connection (L2TP). And tada!!... it was all good.

So I decided to do a how-to-guide just for future reference in-case things get messed up again.

There are two parts to the guide;

1. Setting up a dialer for the WiMAX VPN connection
2. Enabling L2TP protocol on your Windows machine (see below)

Enabling L2TP protocol on your Windows 7 machine

If you would like to download this PDF file...place a comment and I'll forward the PDF to you...