Cannot connect to PPTP VPN with firewalld running

I can successfully connect to a PPTP VPN as long as I first stop the firewalld service. In the past I had added the rules I found for gre in this link and it was working, but not anymore. It’s been a while since I last needed a VPN so I’m not sure when it broke unfortunately. Has anyone managed to solve this issue with firewalld and PPTP VPNs in Fedora 32?

I think you’ll hardly find anyone for PPTP since it’s considered insecure since 2014. If you have the chance, switch to something more secure like openvpn or ipsec(+l2tp).

Back to the question, PPTP should use these ports: 1723/tcp and create a rich rule to allow gre. It should look something like this if I’m not mistaken:

# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=1723/tcp
# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-rich-rule rule protocol value="gre" accept

…or rather, WireGuard!

I’ve been using it for almost one year now, and it’s so transparent that I forget it’s running.

Thanks, this worked! For future reference, the correct syntax for the “gre” rule is

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-rich-rule="rule protocol value="gre" accept"

The VPN I’m trying to set up is run by my university and is used to access internal services so there’s not much I can do. I just have to use what they provide.

+1, forgot about WireGuard.

I’m not using a VPN for privacy, it’s to access internal services of my university and is run by them. So unfortunately, I don’t really have a choice.