OpenVPN Support Forum

I'm trying to determine if OpenVPN will do what I need and if I should be getting a cloud hosted service, and if so, which cloud hosted service??

It seems that AWS hosting OpenVPN is a common solution. I'm not sure I fully understand their pricing scheme, but that's for another question.

The goal is to create a secure VPN for which I can connect a personal machine on my home network (behind my router/model) which does not have a native public IP, and then connect to that machine through the same VPN service from my laptop while roaming elsewhere. My ISP is Starlink. Back in the day I might have just setup port forwarding directly to that internal machine on the router for the services I wish to access, but starlink does not offer such a thing on their routers, and it probably isn't a good idea anyway. Enter, a VPN solution.

It seems the "VPN" many refer to today is used simply as a service to secure your traffic and possibly masquerade from a different location. I need to create an actual VP "network" that sets up tunnel to allow a machine on one star to connect to machines an another star, securely.

So, I'm looking for some guidance on where to start. Is the amazon OpenVPN cloud service an appropriate option? Are there other options I should consider?

Hello mtscott,

So if I boil it down to the basics;

- you have 2 devices that are on 2 different Internet connections (but same ISP)
- and you want to establish a secure connection between them
- and neither of them has a public IP that you can use to allow incoming connections
- so you're considering using a go-between system that does have a public IP

OpenVPN Cloud would be perfect for this. With this solution you connect your 2 devices to our OpenVPN Cloud servers, and they can then communicate within the virtual private network that exists on OpenVPN Cloud. Your 2 devices will get an IP within the OpenVPN Cloud network and can communicate with eachother over those IPs. Our OpenVPN Cloud servers are reachable on the Internet so your challenge with your ISP not allowing incoming connections is no issue.

You can also choose to self-host. You don't specifically need AWS for this, but they just happen to be one of the major players on the market for virtual machines on the Internet. You can also consider Google Cloud Platform or DigitalOcean. Personally I can recommend DigitalOcean, they have a 5 dollar a month machine that would do the job very nicely, and OpenVPN Access Server is available on their marketplace there, so would make a very easy start. The choice of platform is up to you though, OpenVPN runs on a lot of systems. And again if you set up a server somewhere, ensure it has a public IP (IPv4) address that is reachable, and the challenge with your ISP not allowing incoming connections is no issue.

An easy solution for self-managed solution would be to launch OpenVPN Access Server, and after setting it up, you turn off the option to 'redirect all client Internet traffic' and assign the 2 user accounts you create for the connections to this server for the 2 devices some static internal VPN IP addresses so that they are always addressable by the same IP.

There is also the option to run the OpenVPN open source edition, but then you have to learn a bit about how to set up an OpenVPN server from scratch, which does require some technical expertise.

Hope this helps,
Johan