Can't ping server while VPN is connected

jmenashe

I'm using OpenVPN to connect my laptop to my home network. I'm still figuring out how all of this works so for testing purposes I have the laptop on the home network. When I try to ping the vpn server without connecting to the vpn, it works fine. When I connect to the vpn server and route my requests to the server's subnet through the tap0 interface (the virtual device created by OpenVPN), I get "destination host unreachable" for all pings to the vpn server. What could be the problem here? What troubleshooting steps should I take? Please let me know if I need to be more specific or if other information is needed. Thanks!

Here is the server config:

port 31335
proto udp
dev tap
dev-node tap-bridge
ca "c:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\easy-rsa\\keys\\ca.crt"
cert "c:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\easy-rsa\\keys\\server.crt"
key "c:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\easy-rsa\\keys\\server.key"
dh "c:\\Program Files\\OpenVPN\\easy-rsa\\keys\\dh1024.pem"

server-bridge 192.168.8.4 255.255.255.0 192.168.8.128 192.168.8.254
keepalive 10 120
cipher AES-128-CBC   # AES
comp-lzo
max-clients 100
persist-key
persist-tun
status openvpn-status.log
verb 3

Here is the client config:

client
dev tap
proto udp
remote 192.168.1.100 31335
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca ca.crt
cert laptop.crt
key laptop.key
cipher AES-128-CBC
comp-lzo
verb 5

Here is my routing table before connecting:

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     1000   0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0

Here is my routing table after connecting:

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     1000   0        0 eth0
192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0
192.168.8.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 tap0

jmenashe

I was able to solve this. The first issue was that I had another device on my network responding to pings at 192.168.8.4. Not sure how that happened, but it was never actually the vpn server responding. It turns out that I shouldn't have been using the vpn server's virtual address as my gateway. I set the VPN server address to one in the same subnet as my router, and then set the router's internal address as the gateway for my laptop. Apparently as long as you're accessing the bridged internal IPs through the TAP adapter you don't need to set up routing for them.