OpenVPN per process (running on a server)

[Chase87 0]

Hi,

First of all, I'm very happy with the service. AirVPN is simply the best VPN service out there and I am glad to have found you!

Running AirVPN on my desktop machines (Win, OSX, Linux) works like a charm either with plain OpenVPN or one of your clients.

 

However, I'm not really sure how I can also use your service on my Linux server to which I connect via ssh. The issue is that as soon as I run openvpn with

sudo openvpn --config your_config_file.ovpn

naturally the existing ssh connection - as well as any other means to reach my server - gets interrupted.

 

So my use case is that my server should stay reachable publicly as before, but ideally I would like to open a single shell session that gets routed through your VPN for occasional casual browsing or processes which I prefer to use anonymously..

 

Can I somehow restrict the VPN to only one process?

Do you see any other solution for my use case?

 

Best regards!

 

[nick75 25]

Hi!

 

In order to make your server reachable outside of the VPN, do the following:

 

Create a file eg route.sh

#!/bin/bash
ip route add <yourIP>/32 dev <interface>

Note: replace <yourIP> and <interface> with the correct values.

Make it executable:

chmod +x /etc/openvpn/route.sh

 

Then add this to your ovpn file:

up /etc/openvpn/route.sh

Voilà!

[Chase87 0]

Hey nick75,

 

Thanks for the input. I've follewed your instructions, also added a line "security-level 2" to my ovpn file to make it pass. However, it doesn't help - the server still disappears. Here's the output of openvpn:

 

 

...
Tue Feb 28 15:04:58 2017 /sbin/ip link set dev tun1 up mtu 1500
Tue Feb 28 15:04:58 2017 /sbin/ip addr add dev tun1 10.4.1.66/16 broadcast 10.4.255.255
Tue Feb 28 15:04:58 2017 /etc/openvpn/reachable.sh tun1 1500 1558 10.4.1.66 255.255.0.0 init <- here the script is called, named it reachable.sh
Tue Feb 28 15:04:58 2017 /sbin/ip route add IP.OF.AIR.VPN/32 via 0.0.0.0
packet_write_wait: Connection to IP.OF.MY.SERVER port 22: Broken pipe  <- here my ssh connection dies, and I can't reconnect either.

 

[Chase87 0]

I have partially resolved my issue by following this blog post:

http://www.georgiecasey.com/2013/07/26/how-to-use-overplay-and-other-vpns-as-a-curl-proxy/

 

Here it is outlined how you can prevent openvpn to add iptables entries pushed by the server. Once this is done, you then have to bind a given process to the tun0 interface, whereas the rest of the traffic is unaffected. This however relies on the ability of a program to specify the network interface, e.g.

 

ping -I tun0
traceroute -i tun0

 

etc. It would be great if I could simply create some environment (like a bash shell) in which all subprocess get routed through tun0. This however seems a little tricky.

On Windows there's a very useful tool called ForceBindIp.exe, which the Unix world seems to lack.

[nick75 25]

Either what you call "IP.OF.AIR.VPN" is a misnomer or you got it wrong!

It should be your device/computer's IP address (or your public address if it's a remote server).