Router VPN with PC VPN

[Fergal Reilly]

Hi All,

I've recently purchased an RT-AC5300 and flashed it with Merlin (Firmware shows as 384.6). I'd like to have my home network use a VPN for the increased privacy it affords. To that end, I've got a trial of NordVPN in order to figure out the settings, etc.

As an additional wrinkle, I work from home, and my Work laptop uses OpenVPN to connect directly to my work network (but not all traffic, only work related traffic). I'd like to be able to set up the routing so that general internet traffic goes via the VPN, but traffic on the work VPN bypasses the NordVPN connection on the router, and goes out through the internet (no point in double-vpning for no good reason).

I've tried to set up the policy-based routing on the VPN client (based on the details here: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/wiki/Policy-based-routing), but it just seems to be crapping out. The work laptop in particular struggles to connect to anything on the internet - but it does seem to be happening (to some lesser extent) on my home PC. Pages seem unable to load (or load and then die). Speedtest.Net seems unable to even run the test, sometimes it just silently stops, other times it throws errors about the latency test failing, etc.

I'm a relative novice when it comes to routing, so not sure what I'm doing wrong. Could someone point me in the right direction? The routes I have are (work gateway IP obscured):

LAN 192.168.1.0/24 0.0.0.0 VPN
Router 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 WAN
VPN Traffic 192.168.1.0/24 [WorkVPN Default Gateway] WAN

VPN Configuration

https://pasteboard.co/HBI6Dx5.png

 

[amplatfus]

Hi,

Just a mention that I read this:
"Make sure you configure it as client 1, 3 or 5 to use the least used CPU core on your router. Client 2 and 4 share CPU usage with routing, and will be slower."
Source:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/p...-asus-openvpn-client.43029/page-2#post-426754

Good luck!

 

[Fergal Reilly]

Hi,

Just a mention that I read this:
"Make sure you configure it as client 1, 3 or 5 to use the least used CPU core on your router. Client 2 and 4 share CPU usage with routing, and will be slower."
Source:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/p...-asus-openvpn-client.43029/page-2#post-426754

Good luck!

Thanks amplatfus, I did not know that. Swapped it to Client 1 to be sure that's not having an impact. It doesn't appear to have changed the fact that general internet traffic (e.g. speedtest.net) is dying.

 

[TonyK132]

Using AsusWRT, you could cause the laptop to use the WAN connection in the router and count on the laptop to always use the work VPN. You would do that by assigning a fixed IP address to your PC in the LAN-DHCP Server screen, then creating a rule in the VPN-Client screen for that IP address to use the WAN. Now, all your PC traffic from your laptop would bypass the VPN in the router and go directly out the WAN by using your work VPN including your non-work stuff.

 

[Fergal Reilly]

So I took the work VPN routing out of the equation for the time being, and limit the vpn to only my ipad. Unfortunately the vpn was still dying. I figured I'd buy an ExpressVPN sub and it might be different - nope, if anything it was worse.

After spending an hour on a chat with support at ExpressVPN, we managed to figure out the culprit: We needed to set "Compression" to "LZO Adaptive". The moment I did this the connection came alive.

Whilst looking, I also discovered this page from NordVPN on configuring the VPN on Merlin: https://nordvpn.com/tutorials/asustwrt-merlin/openvpn/ - The key step was changing the custom configuration section. Once I did this, the NordVPN also came alive.

Now that I've got them both working, I can try to figure out which one I prefer, and also attempt to add routing for the work vpn. Hopefully the routes listed above will actually do the trick now.