Create/Manage VPN Location

A VPN location is a VPN network to which users can connect to. Every location has a dedicated gateway (or multiple gateways if you deploy a high-availability solution).

Defguard supports multiple locations, for each location to work you need to configure it and deploy a dedicated gateway.

If you are looking for MFA settings, go here.

Location type choice

Regular location

This is the default option that creates an typical VPN network.

Service location

This feature is supported on Windows and Linux. The Pre-logon mode is Windows-only.

Service Location automates secure network connectivity for managed devices. It ensures that authorized clients establish a persistent VPN tunnel immediately upon system startup, rather than waiting for a user to log in. The tunnel is handled by a background service, so the location is not shown in the Defguard Client and requires no action from the user. See Service locations for details.

VPN Location configuration

The Location Configuration is a guided, step-by-step wizard.

Gateway VPN IP addresses and masks

By providing the VPN IPs/masks, you are configuring both: the VPN internal networks and VPN server IPs. Every gateway will bind to these addresses, and Defguard will also generate and assign IP addresses for devices in this location from these networks.

This field can contain multiple IP addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6), separated by a comma (e.g. 10.10.20.1/24,fc00::abcd:0:1/96).

Dual-stack VPN networks

Defguard supports dual-stack VPN networks, allowing simultaneous assignment of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to clients. Each VPN network can include multiple IPv4 and IPv6 subnets, and connected clients will automatically receive one address from each defined subnet. This enables seamless communication over both IP versions within a single VPN session.

Defguard assigns IP addresses to clients by sequentially scanning each defined subnet and selecting the first available address. If no free address is found in any of the configured networks, the client will not receive an IP assignment. In such cases, you’ll need to adjust the network configuration - such as expanding the address pool by decreasing the netmask - to accommodate additional clients.

Examples

1. 10.11.0.1/8

   1. internal VPN network will be: 10.11.0.0 with netmask 255.0.0.0

   2. VPN gateway internal IP address will be: 10.11.0.1

2. 192.168.8.1/24,fc00::1/112

   1. internal VPN networks will be: 192.168.8.0 with netmask 255.255.255.0 and fc00::0 with netmask FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:0000

   2. VPN gateway internal IP addresses will be: 192.168.8.1 and fc00::1

Gateway address

It's the public IP address or DNS domain to which the remote peer's/users will connect to. This address is will be shared in the configuration for the clients, but Defguard gateways do not bind to this address.

Defguard gateways bind to all IP addresses and the port defined below.

This is very handy if you are setting up a high availability active-active solution with multiple gateways - then this public IP needs to be exposed and controled by load-balancers or any other solution that will forward this to gateways.

DNS domain is very useful for example is a setup uses Dynamic DNS (DDNS).

Gateway port

Defguard gateways bind to this port, and this port is shared in configuration to any client.

Allowed IPs

Defines the IP ranges a device is allowed to route or communicate with.

It supports multiple networks separated with comma, e.g. 10.11.1.0/0, 192.168.1.0/24

Right now Defguard only manages routing of Allowed IPs (adding to routing table the networks defined in Allowed IPs).

If you want the All Traffic to work in the desktop client you need to also configure MASQUARED/NAT for the VPN interface.

Allowed IPs with exceptions

If you use broad Allowed IPs (for example 0.0.0.0/0) and want to exclude specific networks, note that WireGuard does not support explicit exclusions. Instead, the allowed range must be split into multiple CIDR blocks that cover everything except the excluded subnets.

To simplify this, you can use an Allowed IPs calculator to generate the correct set of CIDR blocks for your intended traffic routing.

Generate Allowed IPs from Firewall Rules

Enterprise feature. Requires an active Enterprise license.

When enabled, IP addresses from Firewall Rules that grant access to the given user are automatically added to the Allowed IPs list when a device config is generated. Manually entered Allowed IPs are always included.

The Firewall must be enabled for the location for this option to have any effect. If the Firewall is disabled, only the manually entered Allowed IPs are used regardless of this toggle.

• Sources included: Addresses entered directly in Rule manual settings or Aliases and pre-defined Destinations attached to the rule.

• Merge behaviour: Manual AllowedIPs are preserved. ACL-derived IPs are appended, deduplicated, and sorted.

• Any Address destinations: Destinations marked as "Any Address" in ACL rules are not added to Allowed IPs (the firewall still enforces them on the gateway).

• Changes take effect on the next client config fetch - when the client connects or the user manually downloads their config. No active push.

DNS

This specifies DNS resolvers and search domains. Supported format is by comma separation, e.g.:

IP, IP, search.domain.net, second.search.domain.com

Allowed groups

Here, you can specify what groups (users assigned to those groups) have access to this VPN Location.

By default (if no group is chosen) all users will have access to this location.

By defining a group, assigning users to that group and then choosing this group(s) you can restrict access to VPN Locations.

Users in groups marked as admin group always have their devices assigned to every VPN location.

Multi-Factor Authentication for a Location

Require MFA for this location

By enabling this setting, this location will require Multi-Factor Authentication on each connection to this location.

This feature is only supported in Defguard Desktop Client.

Each connection in the client:

1. Will require the user to provide either TOTP token or Email code.

2. After authorizing, Defguard will do a key exchange and set up a pre-shared session key unique for this connection.

For this feature to work, the user must:

1. configure their TOTP settings in the profile

2. SMTP settings needs to be set up and the user must enable Email tokens in their profile.

Keep alive interval

Configurable time interval (in seconds) used to send periodic packets to ensure that the connection remains active. This is particularly useful in environments like NAT (Network Address Translation) or firewalls that may close idle connections.

Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)

It is the largest size of a data packet, measured in bytes, that a network device can transmit over a connection in a single transaction.

Firewall Mark (FwMark)

Firewall Mark is a numerical label attached to network packets by the kernel to help the system make specialized routing or filtering decisions. If unused leave 0.

Client disconnect threshold

Since Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is used to enforce zero-trust security, a peer (user) that remains inactive for a specified time interval (defined in seconds within the settings) will be disconnected. Additionally, the session configuration will be removed from the gateway. This ensures that when the peer reconnects, they must complete the MFA process again.

Minimal value for this setting is 120 (2 minutes).

Recommended is more then 300.

Multi-Factor Authentication with external OIDC/SSO (Google/Microsoft/Okta/...)

On each location, you can choose if the Location should support our Internal MFA (configured by each user in their own profile) or (if you have external OIDC/SSO configured) external MFA:

When enabled, on the desktop client when authenticating the user will be required on each connection to authenticate with the configured External OIDC/SSO: