Connecting Steamdeck to a L2TP VPN on a Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Pro

[brad]

Greetings All,

This took me a lot of sleuthing around to find all of the steps necessary to make this work and the exact settings needed. As such - if anyone else is in the same boat as me, I wanted to make this as straight forward as possible. This will assume some level of technical expertise (i.e. you know where terminal is etc and you've already set up your VPN on your Unifi device). Also this will assume you are connected to the internet since the Steamdeck will need to go out and get some files. I will also post links to the original source material that helped me through this.

1) Steamdeck does not come with the VPN protocols you need and you have to install them. To do this, first open "Konsole" which is under the Steam Start Button > System > Konsole

Step 2 taken from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ws3bmx/vpn_question/

2) Perform the following commands. Some will ask for confirmation, if so, the answer is always yes. (It will prompt you for your root password here, if you haven't yet set up your password, follow the instructions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t5ozzk/does_anyone_know_the_root_password_of_the_linux/ )

sudo steamos-readonly disable

sudo pacman-key --init

sudo pacman-key --populate

sudo pacman -S networkmanager-vpnc

sudo pacman -S networkmanager-l2tp

sudo pacman -S networkmanager-strongswan

sudo steamos-readonly enable

3) Next, you are ready to add your VPN newtork. You can do so by going to your network settings (Start > Settings > System Settings > Network Category > Connections)

4) Add your new VPN connection by clicking the "+" at the bottom of the list. Scroll down until you see Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP).

5) In the settings enter your gateway (presumably you're using some sort of DDNS but you could go straight IP if you have a static IP).
Authentication Type: Password:
Username: (your username you set up on the Unifi)
Password: (your password you set up on the Unifi)

Steps 6 and 7 info was sourced from here: https://wiki.daveking.com/index.php?title=Define_L2TP_VPN_Connection_To_Unifi_Dream_Machine_Pro_on_Fedora_33

6) Click IPSec Settings
- Enter your Pre-shared key (PSK)
- Check "Enforce UDP encapsulation"

7) Go back out and click PPP settings
- Uncheck all authentication methods except "MSCHAPv2"
- Check Use MPP3 Encryption
- Use stateful encyrption should be unchecked
- All boxes under Compression should be checked
- Change MRU and MTU values at the bottom to 1200 each.

And viola! You should be done and able to connect up to your L2TP VPN on your Unifi Dream Machine. Hopefully this helps a person or two out there. Good luck and happy gaming!

[Freakin]

Great info—worked perfectly. Thanks for sharing!

[s]

this worked like charm

[NewtonsNachos]

I followed this guide but keep getting 1 of 2 errors:

“Starting the service providing the VPN connection 'Ubiquiti VPN' failed.”

“VPN connection 'Ubiquiti VPN' failed to activate.”

Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

[laluka_0]

,,

[SecurityForces]

Did not work for me :-(

[Lilibet]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.