Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Does current Airport Extreme allow for VPN?
- Thread starter cmm
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Depending on what you are trying to do, the answer is maybe. For VPN connections to a computer behind the Extreme from another computer else where the ports must be forwarded to allow it to work. The same goes the other way around. The Extreme in and of itself is not a VPN server but does allow you to share USB attached disks via WAN if thats all you want.
I think running Back to My Mac to connect to shared drive on Extreme, comes close to that (Extreme becomes the IPsec tunnel endpoint). But just for that particular connection, as I understand.
As others have mentioned, Back To My Mac is probably your best bet, assuming you have hardware that supports it. (You can use it to connect either to an actual Mac or to USB-attached storage on the AEBS itself.) The AEBS does not have a built-in VPN server like you'll find on some routers, which is what I think you're really asking about, but Back To My Mac comes close.
You can also use a VPN server running on OS X Server and configure the AEBS to port-forward the relevant ports to your properly-configured VPN server (really, you can use any router that supports port-forwarding and any VPN server, but OS X Server will configure the AEBS for you if you let it). Whether this is worth it or not depends on what you were hoping to do with the VPN in the first place. This is the option I take because I have several devices on my home network with private IP addresses that I don't want to expose to the Internet directly but occasionally want to control remotely, and a VPN connection allows me to do that since it's just like I'm on my LAN.
You can also use a VPN server running on OS X Server and configure the AEBS to port-forward the relevant ports to your properly-configured VPN server (really, you can use any router that supports port-forwarding and any VPN server, but OS X Server will configure the AEBS for you if you let it). Whether this is worth it or not depends on what you were hoping to do with the VPN in the first place. This is the option I take because I have several devices on my home network with private IP addresses that I don't want to expose to the Internet directly but occasionally want to control remotely, and a VPN connection allows me to do that since it's just like I'm on my LAN.