I'm trying to get VPN access up and running. The company has a SonicWall firewall/concentrator and I'm working on a Mac. I'm not sure of the SonicWall's hardware or software level. My MacBook Pro is OS X 10.8, x64, fully patched.
The Mac Networking applet claims the remote server is not responding. The connection attempt subsequently fails:
This is utter garbage, as a Wireshark trace shows the Protected Mode negotiation, and then the fallback to Quick Mode:
I have two questions: (1) does Mac OS X VPN work in real life? (2) Are there any trustworthy (non-Apple) tools to test and diagnose the connection problem (Wireshark is a cannon and I have to interpret the results)?
And a third question (off topic): what is so broken in Cupertino such that so much broken software gets past their QA department? I pay good money for the software to run their hardware, and this is an absolute joke.
EDIT (12/14/2012, 6:00 PM): The network guy sent me "VPN Configuration Guide" (Equinox document SonicOS_Standard-6-EN). It seems an IPSec VPN now requires a Firewall Unique Identifier. Just to be sure, I revisited RFC 2409, where Main Mode, Aggressive Mode, and Quick Mode are discussed. I cannot find a reference to Firewall Unique Identifier.
EDIT (12/14/2012, 11:00 PM): From the Mac OS X logs (so much for the garbage message box from this crummy operating system):
Wed Nov 14 16:25:41 2012 : IPSec connection started
Wed Nov 14 16:25:41 2012 : IPSec phase 1 client started
Wed Nov 14 16:25:41 2012 : IPSec phase 1 server replied
Wed Nov 14 16:25:42 2012 : IPSec phase 2 started
Wed Nov 14 16:26:12 2012 : IPSec connection failed
...
Wed Nov 14 17:23:16 2012 : L2TP connecting to server '173.167.XXX.YYY' (173.167.XXX.YYY)...
Wed Nov 14 17:23:16 2012 : IPSec connection started
Wed Nov 14 17:23:16 2012 : IPSec phase 1 client started
Wed Nov 14 17:23:16 2012 : IPSec connection failed <IKE Error 23 (0x17) Invalid hash information>
EDIT (12/15/2012, 12:00 AM):
I think I am screwed here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=383855. I am trying to connect to a broken (non-standard) firewall, with a broken Mac OS X client.