A Chance of Brain Showers

OpenVPN over WLAN on Raspbian

I decided to put this here just as much as a reminder to myself as for the benefit of others. :-)

OpenVPN access to a client network: the last step

I was trying to set up remote access to the LAN of an OpenVPN client, by configuring the OpenVPN client as a gateway. There are plenty guides online on how to do this, such as this one. In my setup, I was using a Netgear router, with a Raspberry Pi connected to it acting as the OpenVPN client and gateway for the LAN. I followed the setup carefully, but was frustrated to find it didn't work. The VPN worked fine: I could access the Raspberry Pi remotely, both on its VPN IP and its LAN IP addresses. Still, I could not gain access to the LAN it was connected to, even though I had set up a static route in the router to send all VPN traffic to the Raspberry Pi.

After breaking my head over this for a long time and getting very frustrated, I finally figured out what was going on. I needed to enable IP forwarding on the Raspberry Pi! To do this in such a way it is configured correctly at boot, uncomment the following line in /etc/sysctl.conf:

That's it! After that, my setup worked beautifully. Hopefully this will save someone else some time and frustration. :-)

Raspberry Pi 3.3V step down converter

Sometimes you create beautiful projects, and they don't work. Then there are times you make something that has absolutely no right to work, but it does. This little project falls into the latter category.