May 25, 2005

OpenVPN for tunneling IPv6

One particularly useful OS X hack I've done recently was setting up openvpn as an IPv6 gateway for my machine at the office.

When I signed on with my company, they stuck a PC on my desk. I immediately wiped the drive and installed FreeBSD on it. FreeBSD is a good server-class OS, but the Mac has utterly spoiled me. So I actually bought myself a Mac Mini to use at work. It will be a while before there's any IT budget for a new machine for me, and in the meantime the mini is just fine, and it was very inexpensive, as things go.

I like IPv6 quite a bit. It's a great way to leave behind all of the restrictions and inconveniences that NAT impose. Anywhere I have a routable IPv4 address, I can set up 6to4 and do things like directly ssh to machines at home on the inside LAN.

Well, at work I don't have a public IPv4 address. To make a long story short, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 just wasn't going to fly with the corporate firewall. I didn't want to make a big issue or anything, so I decided to tunnel over UDP. The easiest way to do that, of course, is with openvpn. So to make a long story short, I was able to set up IPv6 connectivity between my office machine and the house pretty easily.

Then along came the mac. What to do? Well, the mac is Unix-y enough that building and installing openvpn is no problem at all. Rather than fetch and install the LZO library, I simply added "--disable-lzo" to the configure command, then a make and make install. One last task is to obtain a tunnel driver for OS X.

Posted by nsayer at May 25, 2005 02:44 PM

Comments

Perhaps also try the OpenVPN-GUI by rechenknecht.net/OpenVPN-GUI/.

Posted by: Jon at June 5, 2005 11:38 PM

Could you add more details on how you got this working? Ie. tun/tap etc. versions and all that?

thanks

Posted by: pid at October 10, 2005 10:06 AM

I have downloaded OpenVPN and installed the tunnel driver, but I am not sure what steps I am missing. I would very much appreciate you explaining to me what you did.

Posted by: Andre at February 18, 2006 08:15 AM