OpenVPN Configurations

It's not often that I find a very complete setup guide that covers many aspects of what I want to achieve.  However, digitalocean's guide for setting up an openvpn server is excellent and very well written.  It covers many (most) of the things I implement on any openvpn server I setup.

In this writeup I'll simply cover some of the things that aren't in digitalocean's guide and that I usually implement to meet specific use cases.

If you're setting up an openvpn server, please check out their guide and follow along.  Much of what I cover here would depend on a setup similar to what is outlined by digitalocean.

Generating client configurations

This is covered well in the digitalocean guide, but I thought I would note down the commands used here as it's something I use/do often.

First, generate the client key by cd'ing into your openvpn-ca (cert authority folder) and sourcing the variables required:

cd ~/openvpn-ca
source vars

Then simply generate a client key with

./build-key <client-key-name>

If you followed the digitalocean guide you'll now be able to generate an ovpn client config that contains the key and everything needed for a client to securely connect to your openvpn server by

cd ~/client-configs
./make_config.sh <client-key-name>

This will create a client key in ~/client-configs/files that can be transferred to the client.

Assigning static IP addresses to particular client configurations

You might want/need to map certain client configurations to a static ip address in the openvpn ip pool.  For this use case you would generally have a ip range for static ip addresses, and a separate (non-conflicting) range for dynamic ip address assignment (i.e. standard clients connect and receive an dynamic ip address subject to availability).

Such a configuration requires several changes to server.conf and the creation of a folder which holds a client-name config file (which contains the static ip address to assign) for each config you wan to assign a static ip address to.

server.conf changes

Here we'll do two things, define an ip address range for dynamic assignment, and enable the folder to hold client static ip address files.

Let's start with changing the dynamic ip range.  For this example we're going to set the dynamic ip range from 10.8.0.100 to 10.8.0.200:

ifconfig-pool 10.8.0.100 10.8.0.200 255.255.255.0

Next, let uncomment the client-config-dir directive:

client-config-dir /etc/openvpn/ccd

You'll note that I give the absolute path to the ccd folder (just my preference).

sudo mkdir -p /etc/openvpn/ccd

Let's now restart openvpn

sudo systemctl restart openvpn@server

Create files for each client you want to assign an ip address to

Here we simply add a file, which must have the same name as the client configuration. 

For example, suppose we have a client configuration named "client1" which has the ovpn file "client1.ovpn", that we want to assign the ip address "10.8.0.1" to.  We would do the following:

sudo vim /etc/openvpn/ccd/client1

and then add the following line

ifconfig-push 10.8.0.1 255.255.255.0

Recovering after an accidental ./clean-all

COMING SOON

Using port 443 for OpenVPN & other applications

COMING SOON

References

1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04
2. https://jarrousse.org/getting-openvpn-and-nginx-to-share-port-443/

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