[plug] Working from home - VPN routers

[Damon Perry]

I'm a bit late on this but I thought I'd give my two cents.

SoftEther has saved my bacon quite a few times when I've been asked to setup a VPN quickly.
Auto traverses NAT, can act as an SSL VPN over 443, is a connector for other VPN services and comes with a ddns style proxy so no forwarding ports.
You can install the server on whatever then attach your control panel gui to the server.
It's easy and there is definitely a dirty feeling from it all just automagically working but it has worked well whenever I've had to take down my main OpenVPN network or some smartass hotel blocks everything except 443.

https://www.softether.org/

-- 
  Damon Perry
  talk at damonperry.id.au

On Sun, 12 Apr 2020, at 16:41, Ian Kent wrote:
> On Sun, 2020-04-12 at 10:46 +0800, Kevin Shackleton wrote:
> > 
> > The guys wanted a TAP VPN (which CMIIW I understand as a bridging VPN
> > whereas a TUN is a routing VPN.  I'll try changing the config to a
> > TUN and see if my problems disappear . .
> 
> Mmm ... looks like using a tap device will pass Windows broadcasts
> through.
> 
> So, good for Windows, but needs scripting on Linux to be able to
> use it.
> 
> Maybe setting a WINS server and "pushing" that to the clients with
> a "dhcp-options" directive will be enough, not sure. Or set the
> remote machine names in a local DNS and set the vpn server to push
> the dns server would work, but I think there'll be no network
> neighbourhood visibility.
> 
> Or use two vpn servers, one tap for windows clients and one tun for
> Linux clients (and add the names to a local hosts file). Still, being
> a bridge I think tap clients will send everything over the vpn tunnel
> which might not be what you want and probably isn't the best thing to
> do.
> 
> You could have a look at (looks pretty comprehensive):
> https://openvpn.net/community-resources/ethernet-bridging/
> 
> And
> /usr/share/doc/openvpn/sample/sample-scripts/bridge-start
> /usr/share/doc/openvpn/sample/sample-scripts/bridge-stop
> 
> described in the above page, used with the up and down ovpn
> configuration directives.
> 
> You may well need some iptables setup too ... beware that the down
> script might be run in vpn user context (if you used user/group vpn
> options) so you may need to use the openvpn-plugin-down-root.so
> openvpn plugin to execute it.
> 
> TBH I haven't needed to worry about this stuff, up and down scripts
> and user/group configuration is already done for me in the work
> configurations and vpn provider configurations assume the vpn will
> be used for everything and most block incoming traffic so I just
> use a minimal container or secured VM for vpn setups that do allow
> incoming connections (like for torrent client seeding).
> 
> Ian
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.org.au
> PLUG Membership: http://www.plug.org.au/membership
>