Connecting to a VPN box on my LAN, while connected via VPN

1

I've recently configured an old laptop to sit on my home network, and I have it sending all of its traffic through an OpenVPN connection. It's running Ubuntu 14.04. I'm still able to connect to this laptop from other computers on the LAN via SSH and web browsers.

Now, I've also set up my wireless router to run a PPTP VPN server, so that I can connect to my home network from work (with a MacBook). When I do that, however, I'm able to see the other computers on the LAN, but not the VPN'd laptop.

I'm assuming that when I'm connected through the VPN server, my traffic to the laptop is being routed through the wrong interface, but my networking-fu isn't strong enough to know where or how to fix this. Any thoughts?

Some information about my setup:

  • Router: ASUS RT-N66U with merlin firmware (192.168.1.1)
  • LAN DHCP pool: 192.168.1.2-254
  • Router VPN server client pool: 192.168.10.2-11
  • VPN laptop (192.168.1.20)

jmcnevin

Posted 2014-09-09T13:25:26.297

Reputation: 71

What do you mean by "see" the VPN'd laptop ? Does the laptop run some sort of autodiscover service such as Bonjour or Samba ? Can you still manually ping it on its IP ? – None – 2014-09-13T01:15:32.060

Assuming the router can see the laptop, you can forward some unused port on the router to point to the port in the VPN'd laptop on which the VPN server is listening. You would need to know the Internet IP address of your router; the easiest way is if your router can support a Dynamic DNS service such as No-IP, so you could from work point your VPN client to your laptop simply as myself.noip.com:port. Let me know if you are interested in this method.

– harrymc – 2014-09-13T18:51:00.237

Nope, I can't ping the box, nor can I access any of the http services running on it. – jmcnevin – 2014-09-15T12:27:18.410

Answers

1

It looks like I found my solution:

The problem was that my router placed VPN clients on a different subnet (192.168.10.0) than the other DHCP clients (192.168.1.0). I changed the router's DHCP pool to 192.168.1.1-200, and the VPN client pool to 192.168.1.201-210, and now everything is working perfectly.

jmcnevin

Posted 2014-09-09T13:25:26.297

Reputation: 71

0

way to complicated a simpler and way easier solution is to try Tinc VPN http://www.tinc-vpn.org/

then you dont need OpenVPN, PPTP etc..

with tinc you can set it up on the machines you want in your little private vpn, it does not matter where.

tinc will find the nodes it self using a master node that needs to be a server that all nodes can connect to to find each other

how it works presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7P_vvz1AP8

nwgat

Posted 2014-09-09T13:25:26.297

Reputation: 961

Asked: 2014-09-09T13:25:26.297

Viewed: 896 times

Active: 2016-10-24T08:55:52.340