It sounds like your VPN is successfully connecting, but it’s only routing traffic for internal access—not tunneling all internet traffic through the VPN server. To make sure all traffic, including public browsing, uses the VPN’s location/IP, you need to enable full tunnel routing.

Here’s what you should check and configure:

Server Configuration (server.conf or openvpn.conf)
Add this line:

push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp"

This tells the client to route all internet traffic through the VPN.

Enable IP Forwarding on the VPN Server
On Linux:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Or permanently in /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

Configure NAT on the Server (iptables example)

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

Replace 10.8.0.0/24 with your VPN subnet and eth0 with your actual network interface.

Client Configuration
Make sure the client doesn’t override the redirect:

Remove any pull-filter ignore "redirect-gateway" line

Allow the server-pushed route

If you're planning to serve multiple clients or rotate egress IPs, consider integrating proxy rotation on the VPN server side. This can be done with tools like a rotating outbound proxy pool or IPtables-based policy routing, especially useful for web scraping, testing, or anonymization scenarios.

The CSC seems to work when assigning a specific tunnel IP to the client.

But it seems not to work for setting (all) the routes, and for limiting the access:

The wish would be to set only one IP for the client to be routed etc

I solved it for now by adding fw-rules on the OpenVPN-interface on the server side:

allow traffic from tunnel-IP x.y to server-VM a.b.c reject traffic from tunnel-subnet to rest of server-LAN

Seems to work right now, suggestions welcome ;-)

@JKnott
Yes your are right
I am on vacation and it is not possible to change the local network.
Changing my local network I will do it (but when I will be back at home)

So I was trying to find a temporary bypass :-)

@viragomann
Thanks for help
yes I set :

DNS Default Domain "check valid" Provide a default domain name to clients
DNS Default Domain "with" mydomain.net

@VioletDragon
How did you configure the WAN IPs?

I cannot think of any reason, why a OpenVPN server should not work on localhost with port 1194 forwarded from the WAN IP.

Still waiting on the logs to see, what's the server complaining.

I either throw the subnet or IP, just depends on how you want to do it and as long as the firewall can route them.

On mine, Under IPv4 Local network(s):
10.250.2.0/24,10.10.10.8/32,192.168.100.0/24,192.168.101.0/24,10.10.10.7/32,10.10.15.90/32,10.250.10.0/24

Just a follow-up, since there's been no reply. I've concluded that it's related to or at least severely exacerbated by this issue in 24.11 with the dashboard impacting the system load: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/15969

It's kind of like the observer effect--it seems most prone to happening when I'm investigating it happening, or more particularly, when I've accidentally left a tab running the dashboard open. Earlier this week I logged in to get some info on a DHCP lease, forgot to log out and went on my merry way, came back a couple hours later to find that most of the OpenVPN connections had gone down again, plus there were a bunch of entries in system.log relating to php-fpm and connections being refused for loading the dashboard widgets. I restarted php-fpm and the gui from the console menu, and the VPN connections all came back online within a short period of time.

I'll be glad when 25.03 comes out so this problem is fixed!

@viragomann Thanks!!! It works!

@phil80

It works, syntax is wrong.
You have to specify time that token is valid for:
auth-gen-token 86400;
auth-gen-token 0; --->>Set to 0 never expires

For me it works on both Android clients and on windows also.

We use duo push mfa and when we change networks, we see in log that session token is used for reauth...

Also, if reneg-sec on server is 36000 and this option is not set on client it will still renegotiate after 3600 seconds because this is hard coded to 3600 if not set. And SMALLER number is used, so if server has 3600000 seconds set, and client has nothing specified, 3600 applies.

My settings:

reneg-sec 7200;
push "reneg-sec 7200";
auth-gen-token 86400;
status /var/log/openvpn-status.log;

Works like charm for 400 openvpn clients.

This is a config.

client setenv SERVER_POLL_TIMEOUT 4 nobind remote IP 1194 tcp dev tun dev-type tun ns-cert-type server reneg-sec 604800 sndbuf 100000 rcvbuf 100000 auth-retry nointeract verb 3 cipher AES-256-GCM ncp-ciphers AES-256-GCM:AES-256-CBC:AES-128-GCM auth SHA256 ca /config/openvpn/keys/ca.crt cert /config/openvpn/keys/phone1.crt key /config/openvpn/keys/phone1.key

@Lagan said in OpenVPN Client Specific Overrides ot updated until server restarted:

I would like the new override to take effect when I restart the client.

Hummm.

It's possible that a save on the "Client Specific Overrides" page doesn't restart the OpenVPN server - I doesn't seem to do that.
Maybe it isn't needed, as the server has a setting :

client-config-dir /var/etc/openvpn/server1/csc/

that tells the server to look into that folder for client special settings, the "Client Specific Overrides".

Anyway, I did restart the server, then connected the client and it got the '.30' IP.

I believe that is not affected.
I can only see tls crypt (without V2) being enabled in my config.

Yes, I tried that too.
I tried to ping the client's tunnel IP - unsuccessfully.

@viragomann That worked. You are awesome! Thank you so much.

@viragomann I did found out what it was wrong.
The error was in front of my face all the time and I did not were seeing it.

2a767b14-aa92-4d90-a04b-70b5a149cf15-image.png

I have to put in IPv4 networks BOTH networks not only the one on my side...
Thanks a lot for let me see it! 😇

You can check with your mobile phone.
whatismyip.com should return your home IP.

-Rico

@Rico No, and no log entries though we don't have OpenVPN set up.

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 77412 root 10 20 0 798M 677M nanslp 0 937:11 1.18% suricata 86659 root 10 20 0 850M 721M nanslp 0 547:29 0.65% suricata 99674 unbound 4 20 0 113M 87M kqread 2 7:30 0.23% unbound 19999 root 1 20 0 14M 4100K CPU0 0 0:00 0.08% top 69725 root 5 68 0 17M 3168K uwait 0 3:54 0.02% dpinger 69646 root 5 68 0 21M 3260K uwait 0 4:25 0.01% dpinger 71901 root 1 20 0 13M 2768K kqread 0 2:12 0.01% tail_pfb