Help with connectivity issue behind router?

rantic

Hi everyone,

I'm very new at this and have been going through networking as a self study. I apologize if I neglect information or fail to explain things clearly.
I setup an ESXI host and wanted a secure way to connect remotely. A VPN from what I read is designed for this and so I found OpenVPN offers a virtual appliance I can download and deploy. The deployment was a breeze and following this short tutorial) I thought I was up and running in minutes. I did follow the extra step of configuring a static IP but had also reverted my changes in /etc/network/interfaces back to DHCP for testing. No luck.

I tried to test connectivity on my laptop by tethering over my cellphone. I can connect to the OpenVPN Access Server but I can't ping/access anything except my gateway (router). Oddly I can ping the gateway but I can't visit the routers web GUI in a browser on port 80.

I connect to the internet through a router (192.168.0.1) and have port forwarded TCP 443, 943 and UDP 1194 to the IP of the OpenVPN Access Server (192.168.0.4). I can reach both the admin and client webpages internally & externally with no issue. I have set the OpenVPN 'Server Name' to my WAN IP as it was by default my internal 192.168.0.4
Here is the current /etc/network/interfaces, I have also tried with the default dhcp config.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback 

auto eth0 
iface eth0 inet static
address '192.168.0.4' 
netmask '255.255.255.0' 
gateway '192.168.0.1' 
dns-nameservers '192.168.0.1' 

post-up brctl addbr pr0 
post-up ifconfig pr0 up

Here are two screenshots of my OpenVPN configuration: http://imgur.com/a/weIRt

Anyone have any ideas on what I can try? I'm really at a loss and I've googled everything I can think of in my limited expertise.

Thank you for any help,

The Johan

You put single quotes around the network addresses? Interesting. I didn't know it could work that way. I'm used to editing the network interfaces file without quotes around the addresses.

I assume though that once you have configured a static IP that the system communicates with the network? If it does then that quotes thing apparently isn't an issue, I guess.

Regarding your choice of subnet; 192.168.0.0/24 - bad choice. It's a virtual guarantee you'll get subnet conflicts with that subnet. Try re-IPing your network to something more unique, like, I dunno, 192.168.234.0/24 or something. The reason being that 192.168.0.0/24, as well as 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24, is used by a hell of a lot of network routers and devices. And that means that you'll get the same subnet at home as in your ESXi server network, and then you have a subnet collission, and packets won't be routed properly.

Subnets tend to need to be unique for routing to work.