Open vpn setup

[Red Squirrel]

This looks like a huge beast of an installation, but I'm going to attempt it.

I did yum install openvpn. First thing I noticed is any paths that tutorials lead me to, do not exist or are missing files. Also, /etc/openvpn is completly empty. I would expect at least a base configuration or something.

Has anyone ever set this up before?

All I really want is to enable a few of my friends to be able to access network drives, so I'm even considering it would be easier to find a different solution to do this. Anyone know of a program that can act as a server to share files, then users can connect to it and it adds a network drive to their system? Or how easy would it be to write something like this? I'm thinking something like sshfs, but for windows.

 

[sourceninja]

If you have the right router at your house, openvpn is easier to setup. I have set it up at work, and to allow access to multiple machines you have to setup routing. But at home I just use dd-wrt on my linksys router to do openvpn. the setup was simple.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN

 

[degibson]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
If you have the right router at your house, openvpn is easier to setup.

The corollary to this is that if you don't have the right router, it may never work. If your router doesn't forward a particular flavor of packet (I forget what it was, sorry), you're hosed.

 

[Crusty]

For what it's worth I had a much easier time using Strongswan/Openswan instead of OpenVPN for Linux VPN capabilities. If you only need SSL VPN then I guess OpenVPN should be perfect, but if you need more advanced stuff like IKE/IPSEC or NAT-T you'll have to find something else.

 

[sourceninja]

We use openvpn here at my job. I set it up. It gives me full access to everything on our network. One advantage of SSL vpn is that even at hotels and places that charge extra to let you vpn I can vpn just fine for free.

there are easier methods, but openvpn works great and has easy to use clients for all major operating systems.

 

[Red Squirrel]

checking out openswan but seems it's just as poorly documented as openvpn. I don't get why they don't document these things better, or at least make them work out of the box.

Anyone know if there's a premade Vmware appliance made up for one of these? I have Vmware server 2.0 and I can just slap it on. All I need is something where i can access my full home network over a secure connection. I'm even thinking of just VNCing into my PC over a SSH tunnel but that's rather slow.

 

[Red Squirrel]

hmm I found pptpd (poptop) which sounds promissing. I want to tunnel it through ssh.

Only issue is it seems to only listen on port 1723 on localhost. Is there a way to tell it to listen on the outside interface? also how to I make user accounts? I would love to RTFM but there is next to zero documentation on this either. guess linux based VPN is not really a popular thing for some reason, most projects I found are also abandoned. Almost feel like just saying screw it and get a pix, but they're quite pricy.