I’m gonna start with i am no networking professional by any means but i know how to do quite a bit of things but i cannot for the life of me to get any home server based VPN to work i have tried to use the built in OpenVPN in my PFsense router i built a couple months ago and today and last night been trying to get windows 10 built VPN services to work but no matter what i have tried it the client cannot establish a connection with the server
Are you still using the openvpn server on pfsense? If so you need to use the openvpn client on the devices you wish to connect to the server.
If you post your config here I can have a look.
I was trying the client on my phone while it was on 4g and wifi turned off and it would not connect so i started looking into other solutions like the one that comes with windows
Can you post the openvpn server and client config? either the file or a screenshot of the gui.
Can you post the client config as well.
The tunnel network needs to be a different subnet to your local network. Use 192.168.2.0/24 instead. Put 192.168.1.0/24 in the local networks box. This will create a route between the two networks. You'll also need to create a firewall rule on the openvpn tab of your firewall rules. Just create an allow any to any rule. You'll also need to create a rule on the WAN tab to allow UDP port 1194 to the WAN address if you haven't already.
Would changing the network still allow the clients to access a server on the 192.168.1.x network?
Yes, it will be routed. You need to put 192.168.1.0/24 in the local networks box though. And make sure you use a /24 network for the tunnel network, if you use /32 no clients will be able to connect. Also go to the bottom and set verbosity to 3, then if you go to status>system logs>openvpn you should see any errors which will help narrow down the problem.
ok thank you for the help also may i asked for a brief tutorial for client config starting fresh on that
Essentially you want to match the configuration. But the easiest thing to do is install the openvpn client export package (from system>packages) then go to VPN>openvpn>client export and you can export a configuration for your server, just make sure all the info on that page is correct, specifically the DNS name or IP of the server, then export the type of file you need for your client.
If you haven't already you'll need to create users and assign them certificates. Create a user in system>user manager, near the bottom there is an option to add a certificate, click that and choose create an internal certificate and use your VPN CA. Once you've created the users you'll see their generated configs in the openvpn client export page.
Don't forget to make those firewall rules either, you need an any to any rule on the openvpn interface and allow UDP 1194 to the WAN address on the WAN interface.
this is the first couple lines and seems off to me
dev tun
persist-tun
persist-key
cipher AES-256-CBC
auth SHA1
tls-client
client
resolv-retry infinite
remote 71.226.128.21 1194 udp
lport 0
OK, got the client to connect through the VPN but when i go to the network tab the computers are not showing up
Network discovery won't work over the VPN. You should be able to connect to a device on the local network using its IP, or host name if you have DNS set up correctly.
I'm sorry to ask but i'm not understanding what i need to do now for me to access a shared hard drive on a server from the VPN client
I really appreciate all the help you are giving me and am learning more about networking which is good
I mean manually connect to the share, so if you're on Windows go to //server-ip/share
So just making sure it would look something like
//Servername-192.168.1.126/hard drive share name
No I mean just the ip, so //192.168.1.126/share