Site-to-Site VPN — Non-Uplevel (Third-Party VPN)

Stand up an IPsec tunnel from an Uplevel Gateway to a third-party firewall or cloud service using the VPN configuration form, with notes for Fortigate and pre-shared-key handling.

Introduction

The Uplevel Gateway can terminate IPsec tunnels to third-party firewalls and cloud services. We ship pre-configured profiles for the major cloud peers — Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and others — to keep those setups quick. For anything else, the 3rd Party VPN section under Portal › Site-to-Site VPN has the flexibility to match almost any peer configuration.

VPN configuration form

The source KB article includes a VPN Configuration Form (Microsoft Word .docx). Hand that form to the VPN provider on the other end of the tunnel. Once they’ve filled it in, you have two options:

  • Match the settings yourself in Portal › Site-to-Site VPN › 3rd Party VPN.
  • Forward the filled-in form to Uplevel support and we’ll configure the tunnel for you.

Security — handling the PSK

Treat the pre-shared key as a credential, not a configuration detail.

  • Never send the PSK by email.
  • Share PSKs over the phone, or via a one-time self-destructing note service such as PrivNote.

Notes for Fortigate peers

When the other end is a Fortigate device, please confirm the following settings up front — Fortigate’s defaults don’t always line up with what the Uplevel side expects:

  • Perfect Forward Secrecy
  • Auto-negotiate
  • Autokey Keep Alive
  • Dead Peer Detection

Surface these in the VPN configuration form along with the rest of the parameters.

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