I dont think this is the problem either. I had a rule under firewall rules - LAN allowing / to */1194. All of my outbound traffic rules are defined similar to this on the lan tab (and the other traffic always originates from other local machines). However, since this OpenVPN server actually sits on the same box as the WAN interface, I thought perhaps it was being dropped. I tried adding a similar rule under WAN tab and the problem persists.
I have logging of packets dropped by default turned on (I assume this checkbox applies to all interfaces) and the logs do not show anything being dropped on 1194.
To verify its not a firewall issue, I disabled openvpn server and spun up netcat on udp/1194. Connected to it from external network and could send text both ways no problem.
Tried using TCP too with similar results. We can see the tcp connection established but immediately reset before trying to auth.
Sun Feb 19 14:01:09 2012 WARNING: Make sure you understand the semantics of –tls-remote before using it (see the man page).
Sun Feb 19 14:01:09 2012 NOTE: OpenVPN 2.1 requires '--script-security 2' or higher to call user-defined scripts or executables
Sun Feb 19 14:01:09 2012 Re-using SSL/TLS context
Sun Feb 19 14:01:09 2012 LZO compression initialized
Sun Feb 19 14:01:09 2012 Attempting to establish TCP connection with WAN-IP:1194 [nonblock]
Sun Feb 19 14:01:10 2012 TCP connection established with WAN-IP:1194
Sun Feb 19 14:01:10 2012 TCPv4_CLIENT link local: [undef]
Sun Feb 19 14:01:10 2012 TCPv4_CLIENT link remote: WAN-IP:1194
Sun Feb 19 14:01:10 2012 Connection reset, restarting [0]
Sun Feb 19 14:01:10 2012 SIGUSR1[soft,connection-reset] received, process restarting