OpenVPN Virtual Appliance (OVA)

What created the situation to need to explore another VPN solution

For the past 3 years I've been using the VPN solution built in to Synology and for the most part it has worked great! I use it to connect to my local network while away from home via multiple devices(Android Phone, Android Tablet, iPhone). The benefit of this is I don't need to open up so many locally hosted services to the world wide web. I'm very lucky where I live that power outages are very very rare - so rare that I had a little issue with my UPS 2 winters ago and never implemented it back into production.

Last week we had some crazy thunderstorms here and we lost power resulting in the lab going down in one giant swoop. No big deal - everything will be fine, just need to do some work when the power comes back like make sure my NAS is up and running before VM's launch so the NFS shares are available to mount etc. The power came back on at around 11:30 at which time I was asleep, everything turned back on except my NAS while I was asleep and ran all night never mounting the NFS shares - this is a pain in the ass!  When /etc/fstab fails to mount a drive because it's not accessible the folder on the machine is still there, if data get's written to that folder while the NFS share isn't mounted then mounting will continue to fail until that directory has zero contents. All of my backup processes run at night and write the backups to mounted NFS share directories. So that actually broke a bunch of things and for some reason the Synology VPN was hit and miss for the past week and started driving me crazy cause I couldn't figure it out - thus there must be a better way!

Lets get to actually talking about the OpenVPN OVA

I recently used Pritunl which is based on OpenVPN in a project that used several Raspberry Pi Zero's to send audio to a Mumble server and I was very happy with how easy it was and how well it worked.  So I decided to take a look at OpenVPN and I stumbled upon the OpenVPN Virtual Appliance and boy was I delighted! I just followed the documentation...

To be continued.....

Note: If your IP changes, it needs to be updated in the admin panel under Configuration > Network Settings > Hostname or IP Address & devices(Android/ChromeOS for sure) need to be setup with new profiles.
Using a FQDN is the solution for this annoyance & I've been too lazy to do it up to this point as my IP only changes a few times per year.

References

Documentation: https://openvpn.net/vpn-server-resources/deploying-the-access-server-appliance-on-vmware-esxi/