Do you have a router running DD-WRT and now you would like to use it as a VPN server, meaning that you can connect to it from wherever you are in the world and thus encrypt your online activity and surf with your “home” IP address? Here are the steps we made to setup a DD-WRT router as a VPN server using the PPTP protocol.
First of all you need to have a VPN router running DD-WRT. Once you have this you can connect to your router from your browser. The address of the router is normally 192.168.1.1. Once connected you will see a screen looking something like this.
At the top of the menu press Services and then choose VPN from the menu. Enable the PPTP server, disable the Broadcast support and enable MPPE encryption. We used a Google DNS server in the setup, so as DNS server 1 we added: 8.8.8.8. We left the standard values for MTU and MRU (1436) and then we set the server IP to 192.168.1.2 (do not use 192.168.1.1, even though that is the internal address of the router). We added the client IPs value as: 192.168.1.10-15, and then we set it to have a total of max 5 associated clients.
The next step is to setup usernames and passwords, which should be added to the “chap-secrets”. It should be added like this: username * password * (for example: testing * smile *). The * is important, and so are the “space” between the username and the * and the password and the *.
So far, so good. This is how it looked after using these settings.
This is the most important, and now you should be able to connect to this server. Find your IP address, and try connecting to it from your telephone, tablet or from your computer.
Some things worth paying attention to.
- Make sure that VPN passthrough is enabled under Security – VPN Passthrough.
- If you have a Dynamic IP address (an address always changing) it is hard to connect to your router from other locations. The solution is then to use a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS). Such a service will give you a hostname to which you can connect (let us say myvpn.dyndns.org), and they will then forward you to the actual IP address of your routher. Smooth and easy! This can be setup up under: SETUP – DDNS. DynDNS.org is a good provider, which is easy to use.
That was it! Hope this will work for you guys and girls!
