Tutorial

• how to setup openvpn on Debian
• how to setup Debian server with firewall
• how to setup Pihole with OpenVPN

Troubleshooting

• if Pihole installation does not ask for a static IP and gateway IP addresses check if this file is present /etc/dhcpcd.conf and create an empty one if not.
• if connection hangs after pointing OpenVPN access server to Pihole instance check if the following configurations are present in server.conf

topology subnet
push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp"
push "dhcp-option DNS 10.8.0.1"

Handy tools

• check logs tail -f /var/log/ovpn-<<server name>>.log
• restart service systemctl restart openvpn@<<server name>>
• check status systemctl status openvpn@<<server name>>

Express setup without CA

• download the installation script

wget https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install/raw/master/openvpn-install.sh
chmod 755 openvpn-install.sh

At this moment, the script has a bug. The bug is a deprecated option openvpn --genkey --secret which I fixed manually to openvpn --genkey secret

• run the script and follow the installation wizard

./openvpn-install.sh

Wireguard express setup

A quick installation script can be found here

Pihole local instance in a docker container

• get docker-compose.yml from pihole quickstart
• run docker-compose up -d
• set DNS server to 127.0.0.1 in your network settings