HowTo: OpenVPN easy

All,

Why to use (open)VPN at all?
The reason for me using VPN is simple: I don’t want to expose any port (except the VPN port of course) to the world for security reasons. On the other side I would like to use openhab like when I am at home.
For the sake of completeness:
Of course there are other ways to access your sytem from the outside world without exposing ports. The possibly best ans easiest way is to use myopenhab cloud connector: https://myopenhab.org/

Anyway, I always struggled with howtos on the web, because they usually do not reflect the same situation of my system, so I was always confused, what’s right.

So, I just would like to share here my findings on the web about setting up OpenVPN.
I used OH on openhabian for about 4 years messing around a lot and recently I decided to start from scratch. So setting up VPN was one of the major hurdles (I thought).

For not so experienced users (like me) I finally found an easy way for setting up OpenVPN on Raspian buster (and the iphone as a client).
Long story short:
Please check out this script which will setup your OpenVPN on the Raspi AND will generate a config file with the certificate (.ovpn file for import into the OpenVPN iOS App)

It took me about 15 min (and I wasted almost a day unsuccessfully before I found this.

Have fun!

PS:
At this point I would like to say thank you to all the users contributors of openhab. I really appreciate this project and the tremendous help I have received here. E.g from @rlkoshak, @molobrakos, @rossko57, @vzorglub, @mstormi, @sihui, @Celaeno1, @opus, …
and @glhopital :slight_smile:
So, stay safe and let’s keep going!

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All this time I thought I was the only one. :joy:

Thanks for the link. :+1:

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For those who don’t want to expose any port to the internet at all and after willing to pay for a VPS, there is a great script, https://github.com/trailofbits/algo to set up a WireGuard server on a cloud server. Then you don’t have to expose any of your ports on your lan. But you do have to pay for the VSP and bandwidth and such.

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