[Tfug] OpenVPN and routing help

[John Gruenenfelder]

Hey TFUG,

I've been stuck in the hospital for four months now (long story), but
I've got my laptop to help occupy some of the time.  The Internet
connection is pretty lousy, though.  Anyway, I took the time to
finally set up an OpenVPN connection to my home server.  Following a
Debian specific guide, this was fairly easy to do, even with the TLS
certs and such.

I want to use the VPN, at least for now, just for accessing services
and data on this server (bebop).  I then used Gnome's network manager
on my laptop to configure the client end of the VPN.  It works, but
unfortunately it seems to want to route *all* traffic through the VPN,
and that essentially killed my connection to the rest of the Internet
until I turned off the VPN connection.

So... I guess I'm asking what I should do next?  When at home I have
NFSv4 configured using autofs and that's working nicely.  I'd like to
be able to send that over the VPN link along with VNC connections,
port 80/443. ssh, and so on.  Part of this was simplified by adding
bebopvpn to /etc/hosts and setting it to the remote VPN IP address.  I
also added a bebopvpnnet entry to /etc/networks, but I don't know how
useful that will be.  I think this will require adding some entries to
the routing table, maybe?

A tougher question is to make the NFS access more seamless.  That is,
when on my home network, for efficiency autofs and the NFS connections
should use the regular network and IP addresses and when not on the
home network it should all get sent through the VPN.  Obviously, I
would rather not have to edit files each time I change locations.
Perhaps in this case, for simplicity's sake, it would be best to just
have NFS go through the VPN regardless of where the laptop is?

Any advice, links, guides, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
My various (fun) projects  --  https://bach.as.arizona.edu/~johng
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max