Fantasy Grounds - Port Forwarding - Transparent Op
  • Fantasy Grounds - Port Forwarding and a "transparent" OpenVPN setup
  • General
    • Introduction - F.G.Comms
    • GM's machine barriers
    • Internet connection barriers
    • Some NO-GO Situations
    • VPN solutions
  • Proposed Solution
    • "Transparent" OpenVPN-based Port Forwarding
    • Tools
    • Amazon Web Services
    • Setup process overview
  • Local setup - Step-by-step
    • Step 0 : Preparation
    • Step 1 : OpenVPN + Easy-RSA & "new-PKI"
    • Step 2 : Create your own PKI
    • Step 3 : Setup OpenVPN connections
  • AWS Setup - Click-by-Click
    • Step 4 : Your AWS environment
    • 4.1-Creating the IAM Role
    • 4.2-Choosing the AWS Region
    • 4.3-Creating the S3 bucket
    • 4.4-Virtual Private Cloud - Default VPC
    • 4.5-Creating an AWS Key Pair
    • 4.6-Creating an AWS Security Group
    • 4.7-Filling the bucket
    • 4.8-Building the Launch Template
  • Transfer & First Test
    • Step 5 : Transfer to S3
    • Step 6 : Launch time !
    • Step 7 : Connect, test, fix glitches
    • Step 8 : Destroy/"Terminate" after use
  • Use your server
    • Regular Usage Pattern
  • Simultaneous FG games / 1 VPN Server
    • Lifting the "1 GM at-a-time" restriction
    • FGU vs. FGC networking
    • VPNs for both FGC + FGU (LAN mode)
  • Upgrading our setup for "N-at-a-time", FGC/FGU
    • Untitled
  • Appendixes
    • Acronyms and definitions
    • AWS acronyms
    • AWS admin user + API access key
    • AWS, DNS, DDNS, CRL...
    • Possible (?) developments
  • Links
    • Fantasy Grounds Web
    • Fantasy Grounds Discord
    • FG College Web
    • FG College Discord
    • FG College KB
    • Our "EU" Discord
    • OpenVPN
    • AWS
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On this page
  • Open VPN Community (free)
  • Easy-RSA (free)
  • Optional tools
  • CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 (free version)
  • PuTTY (free)
  • Your text editor of choice

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  1. Proposed Solution

Tools

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Last updated 5 years ago

Was this helpful?

We'll use several free tools during the setup process; OpenVPN + Easy-RSA are mandatory and the rest is very helpful.

Open VPN Community (free)

OpenVPN is an "SSL/TLS VPN" that is very mature and very widely used.

It can operate on any unused TCP or UDP port and can easily cross all kinds of firewalls and NAT-PAT routers, even in generally adverse situations like mobile devices.

now has commercial offers but we'll use the free edition for our "do it yourself" installation.

You can select and download the latest version (v2.4.7 as of this writing), corresponding to your own OS, here :

Easy-RSA (free)

Easy-RSA is also managed by the OpenVPN team; it is the tool we'll use to create our PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) with its CA (Certificate Autority), to create and manage our Digital Certificates.

Easy-RSA 2 should already be included in OpenVPN Windows installers

If you use Easy-RSA 3, check the docs as the commands have changed from Easy-RSA 2

Optional tools

CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 (free version)

CBE for S3 is a very useful tool to transfer files between your own machine and your Amazon S3 buckets, with a familiar Windows Explorer -like GUI :

This tool has a free version and a commercial version; however, only the commercial version supports encrypted S3 buckets, so we'll do without encrypted buckets (at least at first).

PuTTY (free)

This tool should not be generally required, but if you want to open a command line terminal to your Linux VPN server, then PuTTY is the way to go for the Windows platform.

Your text editor of choice

Avoid the very basic Windows Notepad for its lack of customization options, no support for Unix-style "End-Of-Lines", etc. If you paste in Windows Notepad some file contents from these web pages, they will look like garbage...

ABSOLUTELY DON'T USE ANY MICROSOFT-WORD-LIKE "WORD PROCESSING" SOFTWARE !!!

Here are 3 very common good quality free text editors (initially created for developers, they support much more than simple text editing, but this is out of our scope) :

More powerful (but also more complex) environments are available for free like :

If needed, here is the GitHub download location :

For Linux-like environments, you can also choose Easy-RSA 3; download from :

CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 : GUI

You can grab the software here :

PuTTY is available from :

A good lightweight but feature-rich free editor is Notepad++ that you can find at :

https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa-old/releases
https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/releases
https://www.cloudberrylab.com/explorer/amazon-s3.aspx
https://www.putty.org/
https://notepad-plus-plus.org
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
GitHub Atom
OpenVPN
Community
https://openvpn.net/community-downloads/