Pfsense openvpn 3g not working

quiricada

pfsense 2.0 rc3 6/21/2011

i'm trying a setup of:

internet <> OPT1 <> pfsense(openvpn) <> LAN

OPT1 is hooked up to a huawei e220 3g usb modem

everything is working ok, LAN side can access internet.

however, openvpn doesn't seem to work, i've been digging around and my guess is that the dynamic ip addresses is somehow killing the initial handshake.

am using dyndns

for example, opt1 is currently displaying 10.117.79.195 while dyndns is showing 180.194.242.221, is there a way to link these two addresses?

i'm new to this and wondering if there is something or some parameters that i don't know about that can make this work?

tia

jimp

That means your OPT1 interface has a private IP address, whatever is in "front" of it (probably an ISP-side router doing NAT) would have to forward the OpenVPN traffic in to your OPT1 IP. Seeing as you likely don't have control of that, your ISP probably isn't going to forward anything in to you. They may have another service tier you can upgrade to which includes a direct IPv4 address that does not sit behind NAT. Some telcos here bill that as a corporate/VPN service.

quiricada

thanks much for the info, was thinking that i missed some parameters in my setup.

quiricada

re same setup, i was looking at the logs and saw this openvpn log and i haven't been playing with openvpn at that time; am the only one with the keys etc etc (i hope); is there something triggering this?

thanks

vpnlog.jpg_thumb

jimp

That is just the server starting up twice. If you edited/saved the settings it would do that, or if your WAN reconnected it would do that.

quiricada

thanks, learned something today :)

quiricada

jimp,

been thinking about your reply re private ip address on the OPT1 and the "outside" ip being NATted and not forwarded by the ISP;

in my case, pfsense "knows" the outside ip since it is running the dynamic dns service
is there a way to pass this ip address to the openvpn service?

thanks

jimp

It knows the IP because it queries an outside service to figure it out.

It doesn't matter if OpenVPN knows the IP or not, whatever actually has that IP would have to forward incoming traffic to your pfSense firewall's IP in order for it to work.

quiricada

thanks much