@wn7ant Sorry for 3 replies in a row... I tend to write as I see. But,
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this right here could be your issue, seeing as you might be behind another (CPE, yes, but) firewall.
That means NAT with pfsense behind it.
That means that you are not using a Public IPv4.
Can't do OpenVPN reliably behind NAT, at least not with firewalls like PfSense as clients.

Also, because of the way IPv4-NAT and IPv6-GUAs are routed, you might be having additional problems (and latencies) because of double NAT and a single IPv6 (/128) address on the WAN interface.
WAN needs at least a /64 IPv6 subnet to perform either DHCPv6 or do Prefix Delegation on the ifaces downstream (eg, LAN).
In the case of prefix delegation (which is strongly suggested), you need subnets larger than /64 (/60, /56, /52, /48).
It's usually /48, but that is not a given (my ISP hands out /56's).

If your environment isn't a VM lab, maybe try to contact your ISP and put the CPE modem/AC/router in PPPoE (or PPPoA) passthrough mode (the CPE will still be a WiFi AC and router for any clients connected on it, like phones, TVs, PCs and such) or bridge mode (the CPE will no longer be a router or a WiFi AC, but just a bridge for PFSense, the ISPs own VoIP and/or TV). That way, you can
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and here you usually you need your username and pass tied to your subscription account (you get those from your ISP)
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In business environments, most ISPs give a static /32 IPv4 for free as an option (not advertising it, though).
In that case, you might get them to give you a static /32 IPv4 for pfsense (through PPPoE/A passthrough) AND a dynamic (usually CG-NATed) /32 IPv4 for the CPE.

Also, if you are situated in a VM lab, you not only need to give pfsense a physical interface (network card) passed-through by the hypervisor, but you also need this interface to NOT be behind a CPE (router-modem or just router). If that is the case, you will encounter a lot more problems down the road. As long as you do not do that, you are under the thumb of the ISP (they control the CPE's firewall) and must accept the limitations that come with this type of setup (UDP connections are notoriously unfriendly to NAT, some applications depend on a stable internet-facing port, you might be getting a CG-NATed address on the CPE, which makes any client behind pfsense triple NATed...)

@mikey_s I haven’t had the opportunity to try it yet but per https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/vpn/openvpn/dco.html:

“Thus, DCO is beneficial even when only one endpoint is capable of DCO. That said, tunnels employing DCO on all peers will see the most benefit. With DCO on only one peer the performance improvement can still be notable but not as significant as the gains with DCO support on both endpoints.”

That page also says it’s (still) experimental.

@viragomann Thank you so much. Yes. I did setup the gateway monitoring and indeed that was the fix. Need to set the default gateway to the multiwan gateway group i created.

@thomas_br Really wish there was a real solution for this. Sure I need to upgrade my device, but I also have a problem right now that Netgate is aware of but has made no effort to resolve without further service impact.

A few weeks ago I went through and tested LDAP auth with extended query in a few different LDAP setups with/without RFC2307 groups and updated the docs with better info on that and using multiple server entries limited by groups for these sorts of purposes.

If you haven't reviewed the docs recently, look them over again.

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/usermanager/ldap.html

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/authentication.html

Also I highly recommend using an LDAP browser such as Apache Directory Studio to test your queries and settings to dial in getting the results you want.

@jims
The traffic doesn't go through the WAN interface in a logical way. It is tunneled and come in on the OpenVPN interface in pfSense.
Also the traffic cannot pass through a LAN device by default. This would require special settings on the device. Since I assume, you control this device, you can be sure that they are not done.

The whole security depends on the VPN authentication, regardless how you realize the access to the LAN devices. The server is under your control, you say, so use strong password and client certificates and you're safe.
On pfSense you can additionally configure, what the clients are allowed to access.

To answer this myself - I do not think OpenVPN user authentication failures from the pfSesne local database causes account lockout. SSH and Web UI failed logins will cause the source of the connection to be temporarily added to the block list.

@jimp just answered this (as I type) to say it does not lockout the local database users.

I have found, with help from Lawrence Systems videos (Tom L is a legend, n'est pas?) I can install FreeRadius package, and enable mobile one-time-passwords, add Radius users with OTP and get two benefits - disable accounts that fail to authenticate AND MFA/OTP.

This satisfies UK Cyber Essentials, and I have a much stronger login process. Today is a good day.

Solved it, and now I can ping LAN IPs and do RDP etc. It was the devices on my LAN were not using the pfsense IP as their gateway, but a different gateway device. I didnt think all the target devices on the inside of the network needed the pfsence box as their gateway. It makes sence now.
Also, a gateway IP is still not present for the openVPN connection, but connection to LAN devices and to the internet is working normally despite this.

@viragomann

I appreciate your help, it pushed me in the right direction, there must indeed have been my ISP router out in the street box/head office. My WAN was using a private IP address with I assume the public IP address at my ISP router.

I believe that traffic was hitting my Pfsense router but the outbound traffic was not being NAT'd correctly by the ISP router.

Anyway, I upgraded to have a public IP on my router which resolved the issue.

@chpalmer

That is a very common problem caused by the need to use NAT & RFC1918 addresses with IPv4.

Back in the early 90s, when I first started using the Internet, I had a static address, I was using SLIP, which required manual configuration. In 1997, I started at IBM, and had 5 static, public addresses, 1 for my own computer and 4 for testing. A couple of years later, when I got a cable modem and built a firewall/router on Linux, I ran into my first problem caused by NAT. FTP broke! Back then, command line FTP was used and NAT broke active mode FTP. At the time, FTP clients generally didn't support passive mode. These days, things like VoIP and some games require a hack called STUN, to get around the problems caused by the hack called NAT.

The answer to this is IPv6!

@sfermindi bear in mind those instructions are from a release from 2018. Things do change.

@owlbear

If you don't mind a video, you can get one form the source :

Configuring OpenVPN Remote Access in pfSense Software

@viragomann you had it right they didn't show up because there were no user certificates. So my configuration wasn't complete.