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I have three machines I am trying to coordinate through a TUN connection.

FREEBSD box running OpenVPN server (tun)
10.0.200.21/24 on local subnet
10.0.202.1/24 on VPN

REMOTE
Public IP
10.0.202.6/24 on VPN

WEBSERVER
10.0.200.31/24 on local subnet

I can get REMOTE to VPN to FREEBSD via OpenVPN and the connection is fine, but it is configured incorrectly. When I try to connect from REMOTE to WEBSERVER via typing WEBSERVER's ip address into REMOTE's browser, WEBSERVER is unreachable. It is reachable if I attach REMOTE to the local subnet directly.

I learned the following while troubleshooting.

  • REMOTE can ping FREEBSD and even SSH to it.
  • A packet capture set up on FREEBSD's ethernet port captures no packets from or to REMOTE's VPN IP of 10.0.202.6. So REMOTE's packets are not making it to the local subnet.
  • The openvpn.log file on FREEBSD has the following line: GET INST BY VIRT: 10.0.200.31 [failed]

So, it seems that OpenVPN is not forwarding packets received on the TUN device to FREEBSD's ethernet adapter and out to the local subnet.

I do have the following line in my server.conf file.
push "route 10.0.200.0 255.255.255.0"

I tried adding this line but it didn't help.
route 10.0.200.0 255.255.255.0


Here's the routing table on FREEBSD

Routing tables

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags    Refs      Use  Netif Expire
default            10.0.200.1         UGS         0     4306    re0
10.0.200.0         link#9             U           0    61582    re0
10.0.200.21        link#9             UHS         0       41    lo0
10.0.201.0         10.0.200.1         UGS         0        0    re0
10.0.202.0         10.0.202.2         UGS         0        0   tun0
10.0.202.1         link#12            UHS         0        0    lo0
10.0.202.2         link#12            UH          0        0   tun0
localhost          link#11            UH          0   193743    lo0


I have read online about the GET INST BY VIRT: 10.0.200.31 [failed] message and it was recommended for Linux machines to run the following command.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
I am afraid to run it because I don't understand it and don't want to get FREEBSD into a strange configuration. I also strongly prefer a solution that modifies the server.conf file to automatically create the necessary configuration so it is properly managed and torn down when OpenVPN is closed.

What is the solution to this problem?

2 Answers 2

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Found the problem. Turns out that FreeNAS, the NAS appliance software based on FreeBSD and which I am referring to as FREEBSD above, has the net.inet.ip.forwarding set to 0. This can be viewed by using the command sysctl -a | grep net.inet.ip.forwarding. In order to get the packets to forward, I had to do a sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1.

This change does not persist through reboots. I think I may have to use the /etc/rc.conf file and set gateway_enable="YES", but so far I have found that this setting does not get processed until reboot, and unfortunately on FreeNAS, rc.conf seems to be overwritten every reboot. It may be possible to write this variable to /etc/defaults/rc.conf, which is supposed to store the defaults for the system and is the overwritten by custom configurations in rc.conf, but the /etc/defaults/rc.conf file has a warning at the top to not edit it.

So, this problem is not totally solved, but at least I have figured out what the issues seems to be. Now that I understand this, I am now noticing a problem with logging in to https web management appliances on the local subnet. That will be another problem to solve.

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Ok, so your VPN client has a route to get to the 10.0.200.0/24 network, and your VPN server has a route. But the question is does your web server 10.0.200.31 have a route to get to the 10.0.202.0/24 network?

Do a tcpdump on the freebsd box. I suspect you will see traffic from your 10.0.202.6 host getting forwarded, but you are not seeing any return traffic.

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  • Thanks for your help! I'll look into a tcpdump tomorrow. But I would have thought those packets should have appeared in my Wireshark capture. Also, I do have a static route set up on the local subnet's default gateway (my internet router) to direct packets for 10.0.202.0/24 to FREEBSD.
    – Shaun
    Jan 26, 2014 at 4:31

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