Newbie: Road Warrior Access to Office LAN

mrelectron

Goal:
I have about a dozen Windows 7 road warriors with laptops, who wish to access all the resources (eg. any workstation, any fileshare, any printer) of the office network via OpenVPN . (The office network is about 10 windows 7 workstations connected in a peer-to-peer manner (ie. no domain controller). The office network sits behind a DLINK SOHO Router Firewall (for the sake of clarity lets call its network name DLINK) with a single public IP.

LAN Network is: 192.168.2.*
DLINK LAN IP is : 192.168.2.1

I'm in the midst of going through all the forum posts, but fear running out of time, because I have to do this in two days. So I thought I would get my enquiry in just in case.

I plan to configure a Linux server to be the OpenVPN server, and use the built in capabilities of Windows 7 clients to access the VPN.

I have little understanding at this point about VPNs.

Question 1:
Does the Linux OpenVPN Server have to be on LAN side of the DLINK or can I setup a OpenVPN server on something like Linode to achieve the goal above. It actually does not make sense to me to have a VPN server on the WAN side of DLINK, but I thought I would put the question out there because I like using these hosted VPS rather than building my own server.

Question 2:
Depending on the answer to Question 1. Can someone point me at the best howto that can help me to implement either of these scenarios

Thanks
Mark

Mimiko

1) There is no need for openvpn server to be connected directly to internet. Port forwarding is enough.
2) See manuals, there are simple working examples. Also you may search internet.