Tag: openvpn

As much more people are getting worried about their online privacy (including me), I started to use a server as a VPN termination (with OpenVPN) when I need to access the Internet via non-secure wired or wireless networks (e.g., hotel wireless network, airport Wi-Fi, etc.).

Some overzealous network admins, though, try to lock down the network usage to users, for understandable reasons: fair usage, fear of abuse, and so on. To name some of such limitations:

• non-encrypted traffic sniffing (who trusts HTTP nowadays for sensitive data? Surprisingly, there is still someone who deploys HTTP for that!);
• traffic shaping (especially downstream);
• destination ports limited to 80/tcp and 443/tcp;
• dns locking and consequently leaking (yes, I’m paranoid).

To overcome this limitations, I decided to use multiple configurations for OpenVPN, I wanted some flexibility on my side, offering multiple configurations of a VPN termination: one for TCP and one for UDP. I want to share some implementation notes that might save some time for whoever wants the same setup:

• TCP subnets must be separated from UDP subnets (I use a /24 for each one; take a look at IANA Reserved addresses and do your math);
• You can use the same tun adapter for both servers at the same time.

Now for the tricky part:

• Most OpenVPN implementations (depends on your distro) require that you supply a configuration file. In our case, we prepare two config files (one for TCP and one for UDP) under /etc/openvpn

/etc/openvpn # ls *.conf
tcp-server.conf  udp-server.conf

• systemd must be informed on which configuration it must start whenever openvpn is launched via its service unit. To accomplish that, open /etc/default/openvpn and specify the VPN configurations that must be started:

# Start only these VPNs automatically via init script.
# Allowed values are "all", "none" or space separated list of
# names of the VPNs. If empty, "all" is assumed.
# The VPN name refers to the VPN configutation file name.
# i.e. "home" would be /etc/openvpn/home.conf
#
# If you're running systemd, changing this variable will
# require running "systemctl daemon-reload" followed by
# a restart of the openvpn service (if you removed entries
# you may have to stop those manually)
#
AUTOSTART="tcp-server udp-server"

• Finally, we need to reload systemd as instructed above:

# systemctl daemon-reload

• Now, if you restart OpenVPN with systemctl restart openvpn and you check your logs, you should see that both your VPN are started:

  11:38:33 vpn02.lin.michelebologna.net systemd[1]: Starting OpenVPN connection to tcp-server...
   11:38:33 vpn02.lin.michelebologna.net systemd[1]: Starting OpenVPN connection to udp-server...
   11:38:33 vpn02.lin.michelebologna.net systemd[1]: Started OpenVPN connection to tcp-server.
   11:38:33 vpn02.lin.michelebologna.net systemd[1]: Started OpenVPN connection to udp-server.

  and you can also check that OpenVPN is listening with netstat:
  

  # netstat -plunt | grep -i openvpn
   tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:1194 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1635/openvpn
   udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:1194 0.0.0.0:* 1644/openvpn