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.

the DIY home VPN experiment (part three - my virtualized OpenVPN server)

Part Three: My Virtualized OpenVPN Server

Overview

In this post, I'd like to share my most recent home lab project - a nested OpenVPN server. I refer to it as nested, because it is running completely within my desktop computer. See the illustration below.

The idea for this project came along when I working on setting up a VPN with my older Linksys router. Basically, I wanted to come up with a way to run a home lab VPN server without requiring any additional hardware, and I wanted to incorporate virtualization into this project. In addition, running it as a VM allows for fairly safe and controlled experimentation, without running the risk of bricking one's router with non-standard firmware.

the DIY home VPN experiment (part two - PKI)

Part Two: Generating a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) for my OpenVPN Deployment

In part one of the DIY home VPN experiment, I introduced the project that I am working on - a client-server VPN utilizing OpenVPN. I will be deploying a VPN server using three different methods: 1) a VM running on VMware Fusion, 2) using CentOS on a Raspberry Pi, and 3) using DD-WRT on a consumer router; however, I would like to begin by building the common foundation - the PKI.

What is a PKI, or public key infrastructure?