Home VPN with OpenVPN

Having just set up an external VPN to pretend to be in the US, I wanted one to get into my home network as well when on the road. I ran into the issue while in the USA recently where I was unable to purchase Steam games as their servers picked up that I was in the States, but my payment method was South African. Never thought I would need to spoof my own IP Address to pretend to be in South Africa.

The installation was almost exactly the same with one exception - I needed to install AppArmour as it wasn’t part of my system at that point. My little HP N40L that serves as a home file / XBMC server started out as an Ubuntu 12.04 server and I needed to do a dist-upgrade on it. For a system that has been running a software, 4-disk RAID-5 using MDADM for a few years, I was a bit worried that something would break. But it is just a server that I play with, worst case I would need to redo it. Eyes closed, fingers crossed, I started with the upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get install apparmor

After a while (remember, this is Africa where we have really slow bandwidth - you can find us at #122), the upgrade was done. A reboot later, and all seemed to still be working. OpenVPN installation took longer than yesterday, but only due to the bandwidth constraints. Only thing remaining was to expose the udp/1194 port to the external world. I have a RouterBoard 750GL that I use for my firewall at home, a single command sorted this out for me:

/ip firewall nat add chain=dstnat protocol=udp dst-port=1194 \
    action=dst-nat to-addresses=10.0.0.1 to-ports=1194 in-interface=uncapped