Category: Remote Access

OpenVPN Server in AWS

J5Leave a comment

Licensing costs start at just under $100 per user per year.  For compute costs, these are common supported instance sizes in a typical region:

  • t2.micro 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, ~75 Mpbs = ~$100/yr
  • t2.small 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, ~125 Mbps = ~$200/yr
  • t2.medium 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, ~250 Mbps = ~ $400/yr
  • t2.large 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, ~500 Mbps = ~$800/yr

SSH to the IP address using the correct private SSH key and ‘openvpnas’ as the username

The setup wizard should start automatically.  To run it again:

sudo su
/usr/bin/ovpn-init –ec2

To use the second (eth1) interface as the internal interface, get the IP address from AWS console and then edit /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml to add these lines ( (i.e. 192.168.101.123/255.255.255.0)

        eth1:
            dhcp4: no
            addresses: [192.168.101.123/24, ]

After saving the file, restart netplan and verify eth1 has the new IP address

sudo netplan apply
ifconfig eth1

To add internal static routes (for example, the RFC-1918 blocks) add these lines too:

            routes:
            - to: 192.168.0.0/16
                  via: 192.168.101.1
            - to: 172.16.0.0/12
                  via: 192.168.101.1
            - to: 10.0.0.0/8
                  via: 192.168.101.1

Then another restart netplan and verify the routes are working as entered

sudo netplan apply
netstat -rn

Set an initial password for the openvpn admin account via this command:

sudo passwd openvpn

Access the web gui at https://ip.address/admin/ logging in as openvpn with the password that was just set

Advertisement