Problems connecting to VPN on iOS 8 w/ OS X Server VPN

Question

Alright, so about a few hours ago I purchased OS X Server, being intrigued by it's VPN capabilities. I enabled VPN and set it up, however I'm unsure if I even did this correctly. I'm pretty sure I've set it up incorrectly or the information I'm putting in my connection on my iPhone 6 (Settings>General>VPN) is incorrect.

I'm unsure of what the "Account" and "Password" fields are. I put in the account name and password used to log into my computer (not the "Full Name", the one that appears in the home (terminal command: open $HOME -r ) directory) and it still isn't working.

I keep getting this error when trying to connect:
VPN Connection
The L2TP-VPN server did not respond. Try reconnecting. If the problem continues, verify your settings and contact your Administrator.

Well, I am the Administrator so I'm lost there. Basically I need some kind of tutorial that assumes I'm a full on retard. I've asked multiple friends of mine that were keen Apple users and searched around on Google for more than hour and I couldn't find anything that could help in my situation.

Answer 1

Setting up VPN isn't necessarily as straight forward as one would hope. The first issue is how to pass the connection from your router to the OS X Server. That is done via port forwarding in the router to your server's static (or reserved DHCP) IP address inside the network.

To make the connection work, you need to know your WAN IP address. If you're using dynamic IP addressing with your internet service provider, you need to have some means of updating DNS any time your IP address changes. DynDNS is such a service (there are others).

Once you've got DNS and port forwarding happening, then you'll be able to determine whether OS X Server and or or iDevices are configured correctly by carefully noting any successful connections vs. authentication failures.

Google/YouTube have a large number of videos regarding the configuration of VPN on OS X Server. They may prove useful to you.