RogerBW's Blog

OpenVPN on LineageOS 27 May 2018

Since I have a bunch of useful things on servers at home, I was interested in using OpenVPN on the phone to get at them.

This is not the usual use case, which seems to be a tunnelling of all one's phone traffic to a commercial endpoint. I already have the endpoint, but mostly I'm interested in using the VPN as a firewall/NAT bypass technique for getting at a specific set of servers, as well as hiding traffic from snoopers.

There's a package on F-Droid, which seems like a good start. But it wants to do everything with X.509 certificates, and my existing OpenVPN infrastructure uses pre-shared keys (I'm the only authorised user anyway). And the configuration interface is fairly clumsy. Even the built-in help says you should get the VPN host (me) to supply a .ovpn file. What the heck is one of those?

Turns out, after some searching, it's simply an entirely normal OpenVPN tunnel configuration file. And since OpenVPN 2.3 you can even embed key files in there.

So I abandoned the configuration editor, wrote a perfectly normal file of the same sort that I'd drop onto a laptop, copied it across, and presto, it all works. XMPP and SIP are running quite happily on 4G across the encrypted link to servers at home. (And if I ever manage to get CalDAV working the calendar should be too.)

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1