After several months of troubleshooting work with Cisco engineers and even escalating to their Nexus developers the culprit could not be found… However, upgrading the pfSense to the latest 2.3.1 version SOLVED the problem!  :o I hope someone could explain what was changed in the 2.3.1-RELEASE (amd64), built on Tue May 17 18:46:53 CDT 2016 in regards to the OpenVPN code to make it work.

Yep - Very common affliction.  Its a good idea to go with the 192.168.x.x - for both the Xs pick a random number between 2 and 254 or so. The reason I asked about admin rights its because its always a good idea to right click the install icon for openvpn and run as admin - and then always run the program as admin after from then on.  Saves lots of grief. Anyway - Sounds like you already have it worked out.  Enjoy.

Thank You so much!!!1 I did not even know what to search for. And when I finally finish my server rack it will look so much better with out a router just sitting there for my OpenVPN needs.

You can do this in the OpenVPN setup with "Locale Networks" and "Remote Networks" on server and client site. How exactly, depends on which site is the server and which is the client. Just enter the one host you want to access. But if you have also set a route form IPSec for the same destination, I don't know which one has the higher priority. However, you may also be able to direct the traffic to OpenVPN by policy based routing, after assigning an interface to the VPN instance. If you just want get access from site A to B, the simplest solution would be to do NAT for this connection at B (by adding an outbound NAT rule).

Aha! Stupid me, you are indeed correct! Thanks!

There is an existing thread: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=112877.0

Kindly bumping. Anyone with any assistance on the firewall rules to allow my OVPN bridge to speak to my LAN? Thanks!

@BeerBelli: Spent hours on google and this forum. A few have tried with the PIA patch that is out, but I can't find anyone who actually has it working. If anybody got the SHA256/AES256 settings working, please post here how you achieved it. Thanks. here my settings https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=112877.msg633588#msg633588

You can delete them once they're expired or revoked. Might want to only delete the expired certs just in case the CRL gets messed up at some point so it's easy to add them back to the CRL/to a new CRL. Of course could always restore from backup as well in that case.

Might be the difference, I gave up on shared key rather early on in my switch from IpCop to pfSense (early 2000's). As l mentioned, all the site-site connections I've done (including a half-dozen or so DD-WRT) were PKI and worked just fine. Once you get your head wrapped around what you need for certificates (the Certficate Manager makes it pretty easy) it no big deal.

Being in the same local lan is a lot easier for my tasks, which don't require any road warrior worker setup  8)

@alfredo: ad pan_2. Haven't had time to test you Single CPU question on our 'big' server. https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=113167.0 Why do you find on big server questionable? It is fully configured with all thinkable redundancies. It is still only one server. Need to reboot? No connection. Need to upgrade? No connection. Something broke along the way? No connection. (and to continue - need to update FW on host server? No connection for a hour. ESX PSODed? No connection. And so on..) So I would push for redundant setup anyway, even if you have only one host server - more room to maneveur. And it is simpler to utilize VM Host resources by running multiple instances. More so - I doubt pfsense team ever tested OpenVPN WebGUI with so much VPN server definitions, there could be some hidden rocks in it.

i've read that KVM & freebsd don't mix well, performance wise. have you browsed this? https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=88467.0

@0x10C in the OpenVPN Client you could try to increase the TCP/UDP socket send and receive buffers size, adding at bottom of the "Custom options" these two lines: sndbuf 524288; rcvbuf 524288 About the OpenVPN capability of the CPU you could run the simple OpenVPN benchmark formula referenced here: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=105238.msg616743#msg616743 in the Reply #9 message If I execute the command on my router with a Celeron N3150 I get 27.41 real        25.62 user        1.77 sys (3200 / 27.41) = 117 Mbps OpenVPN performance (estimate) This value perfectly fits to the result of the speed test [image: speedt1.png] [image: speedt1.png_thumb]

Hello, First thank you for responding, it's a tricky subject and I appreciate all the help I can get. Now onto the topic : First of all, the OpenVPN tunnel is not only a site-to-site server but a remote access one too (meaning sometimes I only want to connect to the OVPN IP, not the private subnets this machine has access to). The tunnels are on a /20 but the LANs are on another, so no risk of collision. Our network plnning has been made to be a little future proof hence the /20. On the PKI, good idea but no, maintaining it properly would cost more of my time than I can allocate to it, automating the renewal of a shared key is no big deal. I was looking for a list of advanced options I can give to OpenVPN to assign a specific client-side tunnel IP belonging to the /20 in accordance to our naming scheme without letting the OpenVPN server choose it.