Egypt has restrictions over using VPN. I took my work laptop and wanted to work from Egypt but my company’s VPN couldn’t connect. And because I don’t have admin rights on my laptop I couldn’t install VPN clients so I used another laptop (Windows) as hotspot after I’ve installed OpenVPN on it and successfully connected it to my own VPN server in Czechia.
I’m considering my self lucky for getting OpenVPN to work because many other VPN clients couldn’t connect to any VPN servers due to the Egyptian government restrictions.
I thought carrying two laptops around isn’t convenient and it would be easier to move with a laptop and a router. So I installed OpenVPN on OpwnWRT to give a try but it also failed to connect.
First basic question is, why OpenVPN on Windows could connect but not on OpenWRT?
I’m completely new to OpenWRT so I don’t know my way around for troubleshooting. So please help me if anyone could, to get logs to identify the errors?
And if there’s actually a room for tweaks for OpenVPN on OpenWRT to work the same way as on Windows?
Thanks!
I assume you’ve gone through this:
You also don’t mention the hardware and OpenWRT version you’re using.
You could look into stunnel. Wrap that around your OpenVPN to hide it from the Deep Paket Inspection from your government.
You can probably still SSH into servers and use dymamic SSH forwarding (ssh -D) to proxy through those servers. No VPN or admin rights necessary.
Or you could install another SSD or USB stick and boot a system you own from there, but that’s probably against the company policy.
Hi, yes… I’ve gone through this. The installation is fine as I’ve tested it in Czechia and it connected without issue. The issue happened in Egypt (by the way, my friend is testing it from there. I’m still in Czechia)
TP-Link TL-WR1043ND v2
OpenWrt 21.02.2
Here’s few logs:
Sun May 15 14:02:00 2022 daemon.err openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: TLS Error: TLS key negotiation failed to occur within 60 seconds (check your network connectivity)
Sun May 15 14:02:00 2022 daemon.err openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: TLS Error: TLS handshake failed
Sun May 15 14:02:00 2022 daemon.notice openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: SIGUSR1[soft,tls-error] received, process restarting
Sun May 15 14:02:05 2022 daemon.warn openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: NOTE: the current --script-security setting may allow this configuration to call user-defined scripts
Sun May 15 14:02:05 2022 daemon.notice openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: TCP/UDP: Preserving recently used remote address: [AF_INET]xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1194
Sun May 15 14:02:05 2022 daemon.notice openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: UDP link local: (not bound)
Sun May 15 14:02:05 2022 daemon.notice openvpn(menshawy)[1765]: UDP link remote: [AF_INET]xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1194