[Not Solved] Use VPN on Windows when SSH is the only option

solamour · Last edited by solamour on Sun Mar 06, 2011 8:57 am; edited 1 time in total

Here is what I have so far.

* The place I have to work with (let's call it "PITSTOP") allows incoming SSH connection and nothing else. Their IT doesn't even want to hear me.

* The people that need to connect to PITSTOP are all Windows users. They can use the Windows OpenVPN client, as long as someone sets it up for them, so that they can just click an icon to start a VPN connection.

I thought "SSH VPN" (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH_VPN) would work well in this case, but because they are all Windows users, I'm not sure that's even an option.

I tried Windows OpenVPN through SSH Tunnel (i.e. open an SSH connection from Windows and let OpenVPN connect to "localhost:1194" instead of "PITSTOP:1194"), and it does work. But it does seem crude and put a lot of overhead.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.
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sol

richard.scott · Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:48 pm Post subject:

Have you tried running OpenVPN on port 22 instead of SSH?

Perhaps the IT people only do simple port blocking rather than application blocking on their firewall.

solamour · Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:57 pm Post subject:

I think I was under a false assumption, because they don't seem to allow any incoming connections at all, even though outgoing seems to be OK. I'll rely on OpenVPN over SSH Tunnel for now until something better comes up.
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sol

solamour · Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:03 am Post subject:

SSH VPN would work well in this case, but I still haven't figured out how to make it work in Windows. When OpenVPN for Windows is installed, it creates a "TAP-Win32" network interface. Perhaps I'd be able to use it with SSH VPN.

Anyhow, it's not an elegant solution, but I'll stick with OpenVPN over SSH for now.
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sol