the DIY home VPN experiment (part four - my Raspberry Pi OpenVPN server)

Part Four: my Raspberry Pi OpenVPN server

Overview

In this post, I'd like to share my most recent home lab project - an OpenVPN server running on my Raspberry Pi. The idea for the DIY home VPN experiment basically came along when I was working on setting up a VPN with my older Linksys router. I wanted to come up with some different ways to run a home lab VPN server. In addition, running it on my Raspberry Pi was a fairly safe and controlled experiment, without running the risk of bricking my router with non-standard firmware.

The concept here is to forward VPN traffic received on the public interface of the Internet router (via incoming TCP port 1194) to the OpenVPN server's interface. The VPN server authenticates the connection, and regulates forwarding traffic to and from various destinations on your private network, based on a defined set of rules. This could include forwarding traffic to your desktop to enable a remote sharing via VNC, RDP, SSH, or other protocol.