VPN client feature requests

[Kevadu]

Hey guys. I am running Asuswrt-Merlin firmware on my RT-AC68U and I quite like it for the most part, but I feel like there are a couple simple changes that could be made to the VPN client side of things that would really improve the experience.

1. There seems to be a hard limitation of only being able to store 5 client configurations. If you only have a couple VPN servers you connect to that's probably plenty, but if you are using a VPN service that runs many different servers in different countries all over the world (like I do) and want to be able to connect to different servers this is a huge limitation. I end up having to save the ovpn files and have to reload them into the firmware (and maybe tweak some other settings) whenever I change servers. Needless to say that's incredibly annoying.

Please allow the user to store as many configurations as they would like. I realize this would probably also necessitate a change to the status page since right now it shows all the clients all the time, but on the other hand does anyone actually care about the status of a client that is both not active and hasn't failed? If a client is in the 'Stopped' state without errors then it probably doesn't need to be displayed in the status page at all.

2. Why can't the user set a name for their VPN clients? It seems to be hard coded to be Client 1, Client 2, etc. Even with only 5 clients that can get confusing, and if you do make the above change then it's going to get much worse. But allowing the user to specify client names would be a small change that would really help I think.

Thank you for hearing me out.

 

[RMerlin]

Please allow the user to store as many configurations as they would like.

Not gonna happen. 5 is already more than is reasonable, and it's impossible to make it unlimited as each client needs the whole set of associated nvram settings to be pre-defined in advance, and each is taking 1 KB per client.

If you need more than 5, then you need to revise your usage pattern.

2. Why can't the user set a name for their VPN clients?

Because I haven't gotten around to making it configurable, as this is a low priority change, and it also increases the amount of nvram wasted for each client. Some models are already running out of nvram as it is. The recent reduction of supported clients from 5 to 2 on the RT-AC3200 was the first step toward eventually being able to afford allocating some nvram to configurable client names.

 

[Kevadu]

If it can't be done then it can't be done, but I don't know how you can seriously claim that 5 is "more than is reasonable". The VPN service I use has about 250 different servers to use from (and I know there are other services with many more, this one is relatively small). I obviously don't use all of them, but I do like to have a few well-performing options available in case the one I'm using goes down or starts experiencing heavy traffic. And I also like being able to connect to VPNs in different countries to get around region restrictions.

Does all of that have to be at the router level? Maybe not, but it's definitely more convenient that way. I started running a VPN client on my router 24/7 to prevent all my devices from being tracked by my ISP. I don't really want to run a second VPN service on top of that to do something like change my region, because every hop I add is more performance lost. So handling all VPN settings at the router level is what makes sense to me.

Maybe I'm missing something here. It's not like I need to connect to more than one VPN simultaneously or anything, I would just like to avoid having to reconfigure all the settings whenever I switch VPN servers. So I don't need more than 5 clients per se, I just want to be able to store more than 5 configurations somewhere.

 

[RMerlin]

The VPN service I use has about 250 different servers to use from (and I know there are other services with many more, this one is relatively small). I obviously don't use all of them, but I do like to have a few well-performing options available in case the one I'm using goes down or starts experiencing heavy traffic. And I also like being able to connect to VPNs in different countries to get around region restrictions.

Just change the server address as needed.

 

[Thorton]

Kevadu, I also asked for option to allow setting custom names for VPN profiles a few weeks ago, hopefully it will happen. I can't understand how changing name from Client1 to "USA" or similar would increase resources usage, but if developer says so...

 

[morden]

Alternatively you can just create different VPN profiles by saving changed settings to a new config file.

 

[CaptainSTX]

Not all VPN providers allow you to have multiple configurations. For instance StrongVPN requires you to go to their web site and change servers then download a new configuration and each configuration comes with a unique user name and password.

With Astrill I can download 200+ configurations which I store on an USB drive so anytime I want to change I just move the file from the USB drive to the router and this is so fast that I don't even bother to store multiple VPN clients on the router.

 

[RMerlin]

Kevadu, I also asked for option to allow setting custom names for VPN profiles a few weeks ago, hopefully it will happen. I can't understand how changing name from Client1 to "USA" or similar would increase resources usage, but if developer says so...

"Client 1" is not stored in nvram, it's just hardcoded HTML inside the webui pages. A user configurable name requires creating 9 new nvram settings (let's say "vpn_client1_desc"), and assigning them a default name (Client 1). These default values alone would require 232 bytes (not taking into account the length of any user-defined description).

In the case of the RT-AC3200 before the recent change, this can be the difference between a working router and one that crashes and loses your entire configuration. Remember that most models only have 64 KB of nvram space to store their configuration, and out of this over 50 KB is already used by default settings and hardware configuration data. You have to carefully manage what you chose to put there.

 

[Thorton]

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense now.

 

[MarioCaires]

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/commit/e64aee3f98ba16c45f0ecbe5bf97f24e63937cad