Well, that was quick.
I was able to make a connection from remote back to the Gargoyle router via the OpenVPN tunnel. But, I was unable to see anything on the LAN. Sure, this was not one of the objectives when I started this journey, but after seeing that option in action in SoftEther, I now want it…because it is wicked cool.
The issue with Gargoyle is that while it presented this option, when it was enabled, the router froze up and needed to be reset. This caused Jenny to start yelling. That was probably worse than the router crashing!
var sigOtherAcceptTest === false;
In searching for a solution, I read many, many forum posts about people having the same issue. The solution was almost always “Failsafe reset. The configuration is probably corrupt.” Well, I did that several times and heard about it from Jenny every time. This was not working.
I started looking at OpenWRT a bit closer. The documentation on OpenWRT is far more detailed. In searching YouTube on OpenWRT, I started to get a sense of the GUI and how to live with this OS on my router. I actually like the GUI a bit more than the one in Gargoyle, and it is obvious that most of the power in this OS comes from the CLI. PuTTY to the rescue!
I downloaded the latest OpenWRT version (15.0.1) for my router. I went with the factory version, which turned out to be a mistake. I had to wait until Jenny was asleep before I could start this process. For a tired lady, she stayed up watching Netflix on the bedroom smart TV and using her iPhone until 11PM. I knew what she was up to simply by looking in the graphs that Gargoyle provided! Pretty cool.
Anyway, the upgrade process should only take five to ten minutes. About 35 minutes into the process, I started freaking out. I had an ssh session open to the router. It never crashed. I was watching YouTube vids about OpenWRT, and they never crashed out. Did the firmware actually upload? I refreshed the Gargoyle GUI web page and it was all good, just not updated. So I downloaded the 15.0.1 upgrade version of OpenWRT. Remember, Gargoyle is a front-end bolted onto a base of OpenWRT, so I guess it makes sense to go with the upgrade version.
Loading that up, I started freaking out after about 15 minutes of watching “Uploading. Please wait.” I knew that something had happened, as my ssh session crashed, as did my YouTube binge. I tried resetting the IP on the PC, but no IP was being supplied. I saw lights and activity on the router, but nothing was working. I feared that at 12:15AM, I had bricked the router. This would make for a tough morning for Jenny…and so me! I power cycled the router. Nothing. I hit the reset button for 30 seconds. Nothing. Then I did the old 30-30-30 routine. This is holding the reset button with the router powered on for 30 seconds, then Hold the reset button for 30 seconds with the router powered off. Finally, power the router back up with the reset button held for 30 seconds. If this didn’t fix it, I had a brick. I went back over to the PC and saw that the Ethernet link was up! I saved it!!!
So, it is up and running fine as of this morning. No complaints from Jenny and I am starting to follow the documentation to get OpenVPN installed. {edit} I am going with the TAP version of the VPN. You are welcome to look those up, but that link does a fair job of describing the differences between TAP and TUN. Since I set this up, I found this link and I am about to test out some of the features listed in there.{/edit}