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Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

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Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#11
post #3

I have a friend who's part of a startup here in the UK that makes routers for gamers called NetDuma[1]. The routers they sell have a VPN client like this ready to go, I've got one and it works well. 1. http://www.netduma.com/

These are actually Mikrotik devices too, just with OpenWRT pre-installed instead of their proprietary RouterOS.

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#12
post #4

Mikrotik's support for OpenVPN/IPsec is a joke. They should just allow to specify plain openvpn configuration instead. I would not recommend these routers with original firmware.

No UDP support after all these years is really quite shameful. Tunneling TCP over TCP is insanely bad, the slightest packet loss and your connections are toast.

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#13
post #6

I bought a Mikrotik a month or two ago, expressly so I could install OpenWRT on it, and use it to get around the Chinese firewall with Shadowsocks. The OpenWRT install never worked, so now I just have a (pretty nice) router, doing what routers are supposed to do. It's long since that OpenVPN didn't work in China, but this should provide a good learning experience, and who knows, maybe it will lead me to something tha…

FWIW I've never had any issues with OpenVPN tunneled over SSH

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#14
Be aware that very few routers actually have enough power to do openvpn encryption with higher bandwith (20Mbit+) links and 256CBC encryption. You may get better results by downgrading your cipher (not every vpn provider supports that) To achieve good performance you are looking for hardware with Intel QuickAssist, I would recommend putting pfsense on something like http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#15
Mikrotik was pre-Ubnt and had excellent hardware lineups. These days Ubnt is miles ahead in the router/wireless-board field, which puzzled me.

While Mikrotick sells its RouterOS, it's not that hard to install Openwrt on it. Ubnt was quite Openwrt friendly at the start, not so any more.

These days I'm just assembling my own x86 routers. PCengines and Soekris do not have the best performance/price ratio nowadays, and they somehow just feel a bit out of date.

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#16
At one point I was kind of excited about Mikrotik routers. They seemed pretty beefy, a bit pricey, but cool as a device support OpenWRT and having an OS that they said was "even better" than OpenWRT.

However everything I looked at was somewhat disappointing. One router I was looking at had an unpowered USB port, that was a low speed (USB 1), which just seemed to be a weird caveat when consumer routers of the time were all USB-2 and capable of running at least a small pocket hard drive or at least mount a USB key.

At this point there seems to be a lot of good commercial routers which are strong, cheap, and don't require much blob code etc and are easy to find (sometimes it was vague what kind of chips you'd get with different commercial hardware).

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#17
I started using pfSense on itx Intel-based hardware and have been quite happy with the results, though using it with modern hardware (recommended with today's faster broadband speeds) means it's usually a little pricier than most consumer devices. Now there's news that the pfSense team is working on a small, ARM-based device which sounds like it'd give Miktotik devices competition. If you can hold out a bit, it might be worth the wait.

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#18
post #6

I bought a Mikrotik a month or two ago, expressly so I could install OpenWRT on it, and use it to get around the Chinese firewall with Shadowsocks. The OpenWRT install never worked, so now I just have a (pretty nice) router, doing what routers are supposed to do. It's long since that OpenVPN didn't work in China, but this should provide a good learning experience, and who knows, maybe it will lead me to something tha…

To get around GFW, use openconnect instead. That is as or more secure than OpenVPN, and not current filtered.

> That is as or more secure than OpenVPN

How does it achieve that? They both use TLS, in both, you can pick your ciphers.

Additionaly, they both use OpenSSL, which is often found buggy and the ciphers are not hw accelerated.

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get around GFW, use openconnect instead. That is as or more secure than OpenVPN, and not current filtered.

> That is as or more secure than OpenVPN How does it achieve that? They both use TLS, in both, you can pick your ciphers. Additionaly, they both use OpenSSL, which is often found buggy and the ciphers are not hw accelerated.

OpenVPN uses its own non-TLS UDP protocol to carry traffic (with an optional TCP fallback), and only uses TLS for connection setup. ref: https://wiki.wireshark.org/OpenVPN

Re: Mikrotik router as OpenVPN Client

#20
post #9
post #2

Quite handy. If anyone has OpenWrt hardware like me, OpenVpn clients and servers work good enough and the setup is well documented: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/vpn.openvpn

For a beginner - I would suggest DD-wrt as its more beginner friendly as compared to Open-Wrt; OPENVPN documentation is pretty good - https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenVPN As for Router support - the best one would be the Archer C7 from TPLink ( http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices#TP-Li... )

Just make sure, what batch of C7s are you buying from.

TPLink started to lock down the firmware, due to the new regulation about locking down wifi devices. So if you get an unlocked C7, you are fine, if locked, you get to keep their firmware on the device.

Currently, the only safe choices for OpenWRT are Linksys WRT1900ACS and Turris Omnia. Both are a bit pricier.

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