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bw23198's avatar
bw23198
Aspirant
Jan 11, 2023

Netgear OpenVPN bug

After troubleshooting OpenVPN issues for the past few days; I figured I'd share my results to save somebody else the headache in the future.  Here's what I found...

I recently installed a Nighthawk R7350 as my main home router.  I updated the firmware to V1.2.0.92_1.0.1, which was the latest version at the time.  One of the features I wanted to use was OpenVPN to connect my mobile phone to my home network while I'm away from home.  However, while I could connect to OpenVPN using the instructions provided online, I could not access any home devices or the Internet.  

After LOTS of troubleshooting I noticed that the router seems to hand out 192.168.2.X IP addresses to VPN clients.  The problem was that I changed my router's LAN settings to also use the 192.168.2.0/24 address space.  So, when my iPhone connected to OpenVPN in TUN (routing) mode; the router was trying to route between two networks with the same address space.  Or at least this is what appeared to be happening.  And there doesn't seem to be a way to change the OpenVPN server configurations to mitigate this.  

After changing my router's LAN configuration to use the 192.168.1.0/24 address space everything seemed to work.  I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I missed a warning message somewhere in the documentation that states you can't use the 192.168.2.0/24 address space for the LAN if you plan to use OpenVPN.  In either case; hopefully this post will help somebody else out there that runs into the same problem.

-Brian

 

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