#tunnelr

Configuring JFFS

Once in the admin panel, visit the Administration tab. Scroll down to JFFS2 Support and select Enable, then press the Apply Changes button.

Once this is done, set Clean JFFS2 to Enable, and press Apply Changes once again. Once you’re done with this, reboot the router.

Configuring SSH

SSH is required to copy your VPN configuration and access certificates, so we’ll need to enable this to continue. To Enable SSH, select the Services tab, and look for the Secure Shell section. We’ll want to make sure that SSHd is set to Enable, and lastly set Password Login to Enable.

press Apply Changes when everything is configured properly. This will allow us to use ssh with the admin password we defined earlier for our dd-wrt install. We'll want to leave this running so that the openvpn process can stay active as a daemon, when we're done. You can disable the Password Login setting, if you want to secure it.

Connecting via SSH

Next, we’ll need to log into our router using the SSH access we just set up. the ssh username to login with is root and the password should be whatever you set your router admin password to.

If you see something like the picture above, you’re in! Congrats. Now we need to go make sure JFFS is setup properly.

Configuring Tunnelr

lets cd into /jffs and make a folder named tunnelr, using the following command:

cd /jffs; mkdir tunnelr

We’ll want to make sure that returned no errors, if you get a message about the folder being a “read only” file system, you messed up somewhere, go check the notes above. If that worked, we’re now going to want to copy over our configuration files from our tunnelr account.

Make sure you downloaded them from your tunnelr admin panel. check their help page to figure out how thats done, if you’re unclear.

copy over the files

First, we need to copy over the *-tunnelr.ovpn, *-tunnelr.crt, *-tunnelr.ca, and *-tunnelr.key files.

I did this by just copy/pasting them into empty vi buffers, but you can get them in however you like, just make sure that they are in tact and include the entire body of text that they should.

create an auth.txt file

So that we can have the router login with our tunnelr account, we’ll need to write a special text file that holds our account username and password. we’ll call this file auth.txt and store it right along with the certs and .ovpn files. The file should have your username on line 1, and your password on line 2:

mrperson myincrediblysafepassword

tweak the .opvn configuration file

What we need to do next is adjust the .ovpn file slightly so that it knows where to look for our certificate information and our username/password. Notice the ca, cert, and key entries, we’ll need to prepend each entry with /jffs/tunnelr. An example of that might be this:

ca /jffs/tunnelr/nyc-tunnelr.ca cert /jffs/tunnelr/nyc-tunnelr.crt key /jffs/tunnelr/nyc-tunnelr.key

Lastly, we need to specify where we stored our credentials so that the router will auto-login for us, make sure to replace the line auth-user-pass with the following:

auth-user-pass /jffs/tunnelr/auth.txt

We’re all configured! Lets test our settings.

Testing Our Configuration

We can verify that all our configuration is working as we expect by running the openvpn command manually via SSH:

openvpn --config /jffs/tunnelr/nyc-tunnelr.ovpn

Obviously, you should replace the configuration file name to match whatever yours is called. If it works you should see no errors and a bunch of ‘RWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWW…’ thats considered a good sign :)

to make it run in the background as a daemon, add --daemon to your command. You can verify that openvpn is running at any time by SSHing in and checking the process table:

ps | grep openvpn

Setting Up Auto-Login

If we head back to the Administration tab on dd-wrt, we can configure the router to make sure and start OpenVPN every time we reboot the router. Once in the Administration tab, select the Commands sub-tab, and type in the following command:

openvpn --config /jffs/tunnelr/nyc-tunnelr.ovpn --daemon

Again, replace the config with your proper filename. Notice the —daemon, this makes sure that openvpn is always running in the background on the router.

Once you’ve typed all that in press the Save Startup button, followed by the Run Commands button.

Thats it!

Verify that your network is routing to your expected visit a service like http://www.jsonip.com and assert that it matches your tunnelr account.