Safe websurfing and VPN verification

I’m trying to verify that a VPN server is working.

I’m fairly confident I’ve successfully followed the instructions here

  https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:OpenVPN_Installation_and_Setup 

I do an

  ifconfig   

both before and after doing

 systemctl start openvpn@server  

and see that

   tun0      Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          inet addr:10.10.2.1  P-t-P:10.10.2.2  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  

is now there after starting VPN. Does this look correct?

When I go to

  https://whatismyipaddress.com/   

I get an IP address that DOES NOT MATCH the ifconfig output.

When I go to

  https://github.com/diafygi/webrtc-ips   

I get an IP address that DOES MATCH the ifconfig output.

When I do a

   traceroute -w 3 -q 1 -m 20  google.com   

I get an IP address that DOES MATCH the ifconfig output.

Does this reasoning make sense?

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you.

On Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:26:01 +0000, rih5342 wrote:

> I get an IP address that DOES MATCH the ifconfig output.

You wouldn’t - 10.x.x.x is a private network. The public address is what
the website shows, which is what you should see.

That should be different than the address your ISP assigns your router.
If it is, congratulations, your VPN is working. If it isn’t, that
doesn’t mean your VPN isn’t working (it can mean that you’re running a
split-tunnel configuration with the router config, but for this type of
usage, you want it to not be a split-tunnel config).

If the address matches that of your router, then you need to talk to your
VPN provider to find out what’s wrong in the config file you’re using.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

I could have been more clear in the title, I’m trying to setup OPENVPN.

My procedure for testing whether a VPN is working or not…

I determine what my Default Gateway should be by running the following. It should identify all gateway addresses including both the normal LAN gateway when the VPN is not enabled plus the VPN gateway if it’s configured and available. You should be able to know which gateway address is appropriate for you network connections by knowing what your IP address is both when running the VPN and not.

ip route

Then,
I run the traceroute command to some Internet address and I generally specify an IP address so name resolution is not an issue(nameservers are frequently mis-configured or dependent on VPN functionality which can screw things up), your traceroute command or any other even without flags is sufficient(I recommend something simple like below). You only want to know the address of the first hop, which would be your currently active Default Gateway

traceroute 8.8.8.8

TSU

On Sun, 29 Oct 2017 12:56:01 +0000, rih5342 wrote:

> I could have been more clear in the title, I’m trying to setup OPENVPN.

The same answer applies. I understood that you were probably using
OpenVPN.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C