Not in reply to anyone in particular...
SOLVED! Kind of... *** my notes included, based on experience with StrongVPN, installing OpenVPN, on OpenWRT, with a WD N750 Router ***
So I've been messing around and have a VPN connection running!
All wiki's or how-to's I found were just utter crap, so for future reference and anyone else having trouble with it, this is what I did:
- Install the OpenVPN package
*** NOTE THE PACKAGE NAMES CHANGE, SO JUST SEARCH FOR OpenVPN ***
- upload your key, conf and crt files to /etc/openvpn
*** For StrongVPN, have them e-mail the openvpn setup files to you in a zip file. Unzip the files, copy ALL to /etc/openvpn ***
- If needed, edit the conf file to your liking
*** For StrongVPN, the conf file ends in something like .ovpn. I suggest you copy the file or just change the extension to .conf ***
- SSH into your OpenWRT using putty (root) and cd into /etc/openvpn
- openvpn --config mullvad.conf (replace with your conf file name)
- If you get the message "Initialization Sequence Completed", openvpn is running, but you'll notice you don't have internet access
*** If you are connecting to StrongVPN and get a "exit" error, edit the .conf file to DELETE the line that includes the wording of the exit error. ***
- Go to Network > Interfaces and make a new Interface
- Name it vpn_interface, choose protocol 'unmanaged' and select tun0 as the covered interface (this one's new after you've started openvpn)
- Assign this interface to the wan firewall zone
- We want openvpn to start when the router boots, so go to System > Startup and at the bottom put this
# Put your custom commands here that should be executed once
# the system init finished. By default this file does nothing.
/usr/sbin/openvpn --cd /etc/openvpn --daemon --config /etc/openvpn/mullvad.conf &
exit 0
and hit submit.
All of the guides I found had different rc.local scripts. This is the only one that works.
- reboot the router, the VPN will connect, you will have internet access, check your ip at http://whatismyipaddress.com/.
The above procedure WORKS! But...
Here is "the catch". If your router cost less than about $1,000 USD in (February, 2014 Internet prices)...
It's probably not going to work very well.
The problem is, bandwidth is limited by the (single-threaded) CPU speed of the router. If you've got a really high-end router, you will maybe hit 5M download speed. This is because routers generally use CPUs with clock speed below 1GHz.
To get a decent VPN connection using OpenVPN, your CPU (in the ROUTER, not talking about your computer!) will need to be about 2.5GHz or faster...(and number of cores does not matter).
If you are like me and sitting on a really fast synchronous fiber connection...and you have found this topic while trying to figure out how to get openvpn running on a router...
You might want to do some research on pfsense