The last few days, I’ve been working on a vpn server for my home network. It’s so that my family all over the world can see the pictures of my son, which are hosted on a local server. However, I don’t want to expose those pictures to the world, hence the need for a vpn.
While using PiVPN to set up an OpenVPN server, I ran the script once and, since I hadn’t finished everything yet, I selected the Static IP option for the server. Since I was close to finishing all the setup, I wondered, how do you change the PiVPN OpenVPN config to use either a static ip address or dynamic domain name after running the initial configuration script?
It’s not difficult to change this in the ovpn config files that PiVPN generates, and OpenVPN apparently doesn’t care if the server name is an IP or a domain, so long as the client reaches the vpn server. However, I like to be a little bit of a perfectionist and it makes sense to change it to make future client configuration issues easier.
So after searching the PiVPN git page and the local /etc/ directories, I realized that the place to change the server name option was in this file:
/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/Default.txt
Just run a simple sudo nano /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/Default.txt command to edit the “remote” field:
client dev tun proto udp remote Your-Domain-Name Your-Port-Number resolv-retry infinite
Then run the pivpn add command to create a new client, and use sudo nano /home/pi/ovpns/Your-New-Client.ovpn to check to see that the domain name is being used instead of a static IP.
Photo by Nguyen Vu Hung (vuhung) 