SDN Networking Involving VPNs

[trollsec]

Hello All,

I've been working on separating my virtual machines and containers from my home network. I've successfully set up a simple SDN zone to serve as an isolated network, achieving my primary objective. Now, I aim to route all traffic from this SDN through a VPN tunnel to a cloud-hosted VPN. For clarity, imagine SDN A connecting to VPN Server A, which would serve as the gateway for all virtual machines on SDN A. For example, if I host a service on port 1234 on a virtual machine within SDN A, it should be accessible via port 1234 on the VPN server's public IP address. I use Cloudflare tunnels right now but am wanting to start moving away from it for better control.

My initial attempt at this involved using an OPNsense virtual machine as the SDN gateway and establishing a site-to-site WireGuard VPN to an OPNsense VPS. However, I couldn't access any hosted services from the internet, despite being able to browse the internet and verify the VPN connection through whatismyip.com. I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if there's a way to accomplish this without an OPNsense VM, perhaps using another type of SDN. My goals are to avoid configuring WireGuard on each virtual machine and container as a separate VPN client, to completely isolate my virtual machines from my home network, and to make services available on the internet without port forwarding on my home router. I believe this setup is feasible, as I've seen similar ones, but none exactly like what I'm attempting. As I'm relatively new to SDNs, I welcome any guidance, no matter how basic it may seem. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

 

[Rufus]

ey there,

I was doing the same thing but using openwrt. I manage to make it work but Im looking for another solution now as openwrt is way to complex and requires to know exactly what you´re doing. You can follow this vid if you wanna try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mPbrunpjpk&t=562s&pp=ygUXbm92YXNwaXJpdCB0ZWNoIG9wZW53cnQ=

 

[sgt_jamez]

ey there,

I was doing the same thing but using openwrt. I manage to make it work but Im looking for another solution now as openwrt is way to complex and requires to know exactly what you´re doing. You can follow this vid if you wanna try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mPbrunpjpk&t=562s&pp=ygUXbm92YXNwaXJpdCB0ZWNoIG9wZW53cnQ=

Off topic - I followed the same vid and everything worked as shown up to the point of starting the VPN. Once I do the enable tick and start button, OpenWRT wants me to save changes. As soon as I save the changes (and start the service apparently), I lose access to the GUI.

Did you have this same issue? If so, how did you solve it?

 

[bindybandy]

Did you ever get this to work? I too would like to try using SDN for experience purposes to create an isolated network which has an exit point to a cloud hosted VPS. I currently achieve this by using a Proxmox Pfsense vm with 2 nics (1 is VMBr0 and connects to internet enabled LAN and the other is VMBR1 which is a dead end network). I use Pfsense openvpn to connect to a cloud vps via openvpn and acts as the exit gateway for DHCP enabled interface using VMBR1. I have several VM's that are running and only have VMBR1 so they receive an IP from the Pfsense dhcp and their traffic exits via the opnsense tunnel. Each VM can talk to the others but they cannot communicate with the VMBR0 LAN so are isolated as such. There may be an easier way to do this but it works

 

[sgt_jamez]

Did you ever get this to work? I too would like to try using SDN for experience purposes to create an isolated network which has an exit point to a cloud hosted VPS. I currently achieve this by using a Proxmox Pfsense vm with 2 nics (1 is VMBr0 and connects to internet enabled LAN and the other is VMBR1 which is a dead end network). I use Pfsense openvpn to connect to a cloud vps via openvpn and acts as the exit gateway for DHCP enabled interface using VMBR1. I have several VM's that are running and only have VMBR1 so they receive an IP from the Pfsense dhcp and their traffic exits via the opnsense tunnel. Each VM can talk to the others but they cannot communicate with the VMBR0 LAN so are isolated as such. There may be an easier way to do this but it works

I did get it to work. It was a matter of my desktop PC and my OpenWRT VM being on different VLANs. I had to add my PC VLAN to the Static Route section of OpenWRT or move my desktop to the same VLAN as OpenWRT.