Hi all,

I am pretty new to VPNs and I think I just need a few simple hints. I read the manual, but all these possibilities seem to be a little to much for my simple problem.

We are a research group at a university (which does not have a vpn ) and we want to be able to access several university services that are only available in the university network (block by university firewall) from home. This includes access to several servers (Samba, Image Databases, other ressources) over various protocols, so a simple www/ftp proxy is not enough.

The idea is to setup a very simple vpn server, behind which are no other machines (the servers we want to access are in several networks).

So far, I have set up openvpn on a CentOS machine and followed this howto:
http://www.howtoforge.com/openvpn-server-on-centos-5.2

No I am stuck when it comes to the configuration file. I modified the configuration file from the tutorial: (Of course with correct IPs, I just don't want to show our server IPs here )

proto tcp
dev tun
ca ca.crt
cert server.crt
key server.key
dh dh1024.pem
server X.XX.248.147 255.255.255.0
push "dhcp-option DNS XX.XX.20.20"
push "dhcp-option WINS XX.XX.248.215"
push "route 192.168.168.0 255.255.255.0"
ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt
keepalive 10 120
comp-lzo
user nobody
group users
persist-key
persist-tun
status openvpn-status.log
verb 3
client-to-client
duplicate-cn # (this means several users can use the same key)

But I keep on getting various error messages. However, there seem to be some options in the configuration that I probably do not need. Can somebody give me some hints on what a configuration file for me would look like?

Thanks for any help!

Nils

Hello

First of all, I'm pretty sure you are violating a network policy of your university if you try to bypass the firewalls without authorization from the administrators. So be aware of that.

Now to face your problem, you should think about which kind of integration you need. OpenVPN supports two modi, the first one is routing, where the clients are in a separate network and traffic will be routed between the server (university) network and the client network. If you can't access any routers in the server network, then you won't use this method.

The second method is bridging. This will actually merge both networks together on the data link layer (Ethernet). You will probably want to do this.

Here is a tutorial for bridging on Linux: http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-sourc ... dging.html