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I'm trying to use OpenVPN with and OpenWRT router. Full disclosure - I'm not a Networking guru and I honestly only understand about 1/4 of the OpenWRT configuration properties.

What I hope to accomplish is to have my router act as a VPN server where, for all intents and purposes, the client acts as a device on the LAN interface. Specifically, the two goals are:

  1. To be able to send Wake On Lan packets to my Windows desktop remotely. Alternatively, to be able to hit 192.168.1.1 through the browser and use LuCI to send the WOL packet.
  2. To remotely connect to my Windows Desktop (Preferably via Windows Remote Desktop but I'll take VNC if it significantly simplifies things)

Here's what I currently have configured:

  • Dynamic DNS set up so that I can hit my router from outside by name
  • Static IP address for the Windows Desktop set to 192.168.1.51. I'm totally happy to adjust the static IP value as I have no idea what it should be.
  • Both ethernet and wifi are set up under the lan interface.
  • A Firewall Traffic forwarding rule: Any traffic; From any host in vpn; To IP 192.168.1.51, port 3389 in lan: Accept Forward

Some additional things I've tried:

  • Followed (somewhat blindly) the instructions on https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vpn.openvpn for an OpenVPN server.
  • Doing so lets me connect to the VPN, but Tunnelblick warns that there is no change in external IP address. I am unable to ping either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.1.51

I'm not really sure where to go next.

1 Answer 1

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Sorry, you are in over your head (which is not to say you can't learn to swim).

WOL

Wake-on-Lan will not natively work over a WAN, which means that to would need to set up openVPN as a TAP device on the LAN interface rather then the generally more appropriate TUN device on the WAN interface - which makes connecting to to your desktop over OpenVPN much harder. (And indeed, TUN devices are generally slower and messier then TAP devices, and are usually avoided).

You might be better served setting the device up in the standard TUN mode and then ssh'ing in to the router (across the VPN) and issuing the WOL request from the router itself.

RDP

Getting RDP and VNC working across a VPN connection are of similar complexity. The trick is to have VPN advertise the routes for the LAN to the client.

In order to provide specific assistance, you really need to provide configuration files and the IP ranges of your LAN. Its difficult to provide help without this, but have a look at this link.

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  • I was afraid this might be a bit out of my league ;) It sounds like I need to do a bit more research before I have a more specific question to ask. I appreciate the help and will update once I have more specifics!
    – zashu
    Mar 23, 2016 at 20:07
  • I made a few edits that I'm hoping clarify the question. After some more research and fiddling, a few of my initial ideas were way off the mark.
    – zashu
    Mar 28, 2016 at 2:29

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