setup openvpn to redirect to a home server

stevwills

ok. so I am planning to setup an home cloud server using owncloud. what I want is to be able to connect to this server from anywhere in the world without having to always know what my home IP. So I have this VPS on wich I run openvpn and I want to be able to connect to my vps and my vps would redirect me through the openvpn tunnels right to my home server. I thought it would be simple but what I realised is that my clients can ping the vpn server through the tunnel but my server can't ping back and my clients can't ping each other within the vpn network. (clients are in the same home)
(The VPN does work because once I'm connected to the vpn, my public IP changes.)
so my first question is, 1) is it possible?
2) if its possible, how do I make this work?

Here are my server.conf file if this can help us set this up

user@vps54488:/etc/openvpn# grep -vE '^#|^;|^$' server.conf
port 1194
proto udp
dev tun
sndbuf 0
rcvbuf 0
ca ca.crt
cert server.crt
key server.key
dh dh.pem
topology subnet
server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt
push "redirect-gateway def bypass-dhcp"
push "dhcp-option DNS 213.186.33.99"
keepalive 10 120
comp-lzo
persist-key
persist-tun
status openvpn-status.log
verb 3
crl-verify /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/pki/crl.pem

TinCanTech

stevwills wrotemy clients can't ping each other within the vpn network

See --client-to-client in The Manual v23x

stevwills

See --client-to-client in The Manual v23x

Very interesting, so from what I've read, I can use the argument ---client-to-client to enable internal routing from one client to another, this is exactly what I am looking for. only one problem, I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to openvpn and linux. :lol: so where exactly am I supposed to add this argument? in iptables? in a .conf file? XD.

I thank you for all your help 😃

TinCanTech

Please see the OpenVPN HOWTO:
HOWTO: For OpenVPN Community Edition

stevwills

ok Figured out where the server.conf is. in the sample-config files. so I Went on and Vim the server.conf.gz file and uncommented the client-to-client setting. I then saved the file and quit. rebooted the server and tried to connect to it unfortunatly the client traffic was no longer being redirected. Am I doing something wrong???

Thanks for the help. 🙂

TinCanTech

stevwills wrote in the sample-config files. so I Went on and Vim the server.conf.gz file and uncommented the client-to-client setting

Why ?

stevwills wrote so where exactly am I supposed to add this argument?

Here:

stevwills wroteuser@vps54488:/etc/openvpn# <s> server.conf

stevwills

yup editing /etc/openvpn/server.conf worked now all my clients can ping each other. but my server can't ping my clients. There must be something else i'm missing???

thank you for your help.