When your business hinges upon remote workers and remote offices, secure connections, and lots of data manipulation… how do you deal with some of your folks being extra remote? Granted the internet in 2020 is very different from the internet in say 2008 and the world has grown ever smaller as a result… but distance […]
The current state of the world has caused some unique stresses on IT infrastructure. For IT departments servicing internal teams, remote access infrastructure in particular has felt the brunt of the blow. To that end, I spent a couple of weeks testing out enterprise VPN solutions.
I have been taking a free networking class from Stanford University’s online “open source” education platform. I have really been enjoying the first unit of the course as it has started filling in some gaps in the foundation of my understanding regarding networking, the internet, and TCP/IP. I highly recommend this to anyone that has […]
One of the things I wanted to get from my OpenVPN Access Server was a usage report that would be emailed to me regularly. OpenVPN Access Server writes such logs to a file in /var/log on Ubuntu and Debian based systems. However it also writes a lot of other things. So I first started by […]
Open VPN Access Server uses NAT (Network Address Translation) to “ease” routing VPN user traffic to the rest of a remote network. This isn’t always a desirable configuration. If you want to disable NAT globally, you can do so by logging into the shell as a root user on your OpenVPN Access Server and doing […]
I am just archiving this link for myself (and anyone else that needs this information) as well as the pertinent information therein. Basically if you run multiple OpenVPN servers in your environment you probably need your OpenVPN Connect Client to be able to handle multiple profiles. This isn’t enabled out of the box for the […]
Heartbleed was a major vulnerability in the SSL protocol used by many many sites and services. Folks have been scrambling to patch it up quickly since it was announced a few days prior. If you are in the process of doing just that for yourself or your organization, you might be so busy fixing websites […]
Most UTM (unified threat management) Firewall devices worth their price tag include a VPN server as part of the mix. In my experience, a UTM is an excellent choice for a small office and/or most smaller enterprises as several of the higher-end devices scale quite far. For a larger, corporate network though, while a UTM […]
Google Authenticator, and (all?) other rotating-pin multi-factor authentication systems, rely on the clock on the token device (in this case your smart-phone or tablet) and the authenticating system (in this case the OpenVPN server). If the clocks are different by more than a few seconds or so, it will break your authentication.
Thought I would post this one quickly… Having trouble getting OpenVPN to start/work for you and you are seeing this error in your logs? “TCP/UDP: Socket bind failed on local address” The resolution is pretty simple. Try changing the port you have assigned to openVPN in your config file and restarting the service. Most likely […]
I am not sure when OpenVPN added multi-factor support to their Access Server but I am thrilled that they did. It must have been recently (within the last few weeks or months) as I was using OpenVPN Access Server about 4 months ago as a temporary solution while my main solution was down and it […]
In a previous post I dealt with setting up an OpenVPN Community Edition server which is the free version of OpenVPN. I had initially hoped to use Authy for two-factor authentication in addition to LDAP but later found out that wasn’t going to work. So now I am looking at using DUO for two-factor authentication […]
After having already gotten a full page into writing a walkthrough (not to mention hours already spent with Authy) I found out that Authy will NOT WORK with OpenVPN and LDAP authentication unless the folks at Authy customize the ldap module for you. Which requires enterprise support, at a retail price of $500/month! Which was […]
INTRODUCTION I wrestled with getting OpenVPN to work with Microsoft Active Directory authentication better part of 2 days. I was surprised that it was so hard to find a straightfoward tutorial on the topic that actually worked! I had to do a lot of Google-Fu and look at many different pages to put together what […]