My boss asked me to set up a VPN for our tiny office (4 people) due the stay at/work from home orders due to COVID-19. All of our clients are Win7/Win10 and the office network is all Win7/Win10 desktops in a simple workgroup -- no domain controllers, WINS servers or other stuff. The OpenVPN server will be a linux machine with two NICs: One directly on the internet and one of the office net.
I have been trying to get this working, first with IPFire's OpenVPN but they finally told me they don't support clients being "full" members of the protected network (i.e. full broadcast support, discoverable by other machines on the network, etc.) even though I KNOW that OpenVPN supports this. So I have spent the past week trying to get OpenVPN working on Ubuntu 18.04 only to discover two things:
- I cannot find ANY reference material for OpenVPN/18.04 that uses the netplan system in 18.04. It appears that old documentation and examples have just been re-labeled as 18.04 without being actually tested on it.
- Apparently, netplan doesn't work well with bridged networks, so even though I managed to get a br0 device created and connect a Windows 10 client to the OpenVPN server, the client cannot see ANYTHING on the OpenVPN network, not even the server itself.
I'm going to try again using Ubuntu 16.04 as a base (FYI, I'm most familiar with Ubuntu) but if anyone knows of a step-by-step set of instructions for setting up the type of OpenVPN server I need for either 16.04 (or even 18.04, but using the ACTUALLY things found on 18.04 instead of assuming it is the same as earlier releases) I would love to read them. I have found that pages that include statements like "just get to [point X] in this other setup [link] then do what I say, then continue some other [link] setup to the end have never worked for me. A complete set of [hopefully tested] instructions would be a great benefit to me and all of the other new users.
