OpenVPN Bridges

Introduction

We are very exited about a new feature which is now part of MESHdesk as well as APdesk.
With this feature you can bridge one or more of the entry points (or SSIDs) with a OpenVPN tunnel that can sit any place on the Internet.
I can now for instance connect to a SSID in South Africa while it will appear that I am browsing from an IP Address that is located somewhere in Europe or North America.
This feature opens up the door to so many new possibilities but those we leave to your own creative powers.
Our tests have proven that there is not reason for a dramatic drop on bandwidth while going this route, in fact, depending how and where you connect, you might even experience an increase in available bandwidth!
We are sure by now you are in a dire need to check out this feature. Unfortunately the initial setup can be quite involved, but once everything is in place it should run like a Swiss watch.
We will follow a divide and conquer rule and break the tasks up into categories in order to accomplish our goal.

For this document we will configure the following setup.

One Ubuntu 18.04 server with two Ethernet cards and one public IP Address.
- Eth1 will have the Public IP Address (198.27.111.78)
- Eth0 will be segmented using VLANs.
- We will not need any VLAN capable switches.
Another server (can be the same) running the latest SVN of RADIUSdesk
An Access Point with Internet access, running the latest build from SVN of the MESHdesk firmware.

If your server has only one Ethernet port it is not a train smash!
We offer an alternative which will use the dummy module to mimick a real Ethernet port.

We will use VLANs configured on Eth0 as follows:
- VLAN 101 will have Address range 10.101.0.0/16.
- VLAN 102 will have Address range 10.102.0.0/16.
- VLAN 103 will have Address range 10.103.0.0/16.
These VLANs will each be bridged on the one side with a VLAN on eth0.
- br0.101 are bridged with eth0.101.
- br0.102 are bridged with eth0.102.
- br0.103 are bridged with eth0.103.

The other side of the bridge is a VPN tunnel.
- We will create three instances of OpenVPN in server mode.
- Each of these instances will be bound to a common IP Address (198.27.111.78) but it will have a unique port to ensure uniqueness.

Each of the bridges will have a Coova Chilli captive portal running.
- The IP Address range of each of these Coova Chilli instances will be such that it can provide enough IP Addresses but also in such a manner that the OpenVPN server will be able to provide up to 100 Clients with IP Addresses and the RADIUSdesk server should provide another 100 Clients with IP Addresses without a conflict.
- The IP Address range should also reflect that which was assigned to the VLAN.