Only those who have patience to do simple things perfectly ever acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.
Today is the day we decided to connect our own OpenVPN server to our Cloud Radius server. Since people tend to say “I have no idea what this Cloud Radius is.”, I thought it would be a good idea to document the process.
What can go wrong?
Sorry to say this but nothing went wrong. As a matter of fact connecting the OpenVPN server to our Cloud Radius server took only a few seconds. As a matter of fact we didn’t have to do any additional configuration on our Site settings in the Cloud Radius server since we already had the site registered in the Cloud Radius server.
The config we had to do was on the OpenVPN server itself.
OpenVPN Config
So, how did we go about doing it?
Firstly we enabled the RADIUS authentication protocol on the OpenVPN server and added the Cloud Radius IP address and the Authentication and Accounting ports. We also had to set the setting to enable accounting. You have to select MS-CHAP-v2 as the authentication protocol.
We then had to recreate the user permissions since we initially created the users without their Cloud Radius user credentials.
IMPORTANT: It is quite important to not select the Allow Auto-login. This setting will allow your users to bypass the Cloud Radius authentication and just login with the certificate.
After this we had to recreate the profiles since we now want the users to login with their Cloud Radius credentials.
You will see that the profile gets created as a User-Locked profile. This indicates that the user will have to use the Cloud Radius credentials.
Enter Cloud Radius
So here is my user in Cloud Radius.
The info we used in the OpenVPN RADIUS configuration can be seen on the left-hand dashboard panel.
The credentials used when connecting to OpenVPN is the credentials in the Cloud Radius contents panel.
Easy hey…
The VPN connection on my iPhone device
So I send the profile that was generated in OpenVPN to my iPhone and I imported it into the OpenVPN client on my phone.
Tap the ADD button and we’re ready to go.
Next enter your Cloud Radius user password.
Lastly just connect to the OpenVPN.
The proof is in the pudding
Here you can see my iPhone connected to the OpenVPN using Cloud Radius to do the authentication. This is one of the more useful screens in Cloud Radius which will show you the current user sessions on your Cloud Radius server.
Conclusion
In this post we show you how to configure an OpenVPN server to make use of Cloud Radius authentication and accounting.
Once your Cloud Radius server is setup and your site and users created, the bulk of the work needs to get done in OpenVPN.
Cloud Radius is an affordable, simple but powerful tool that will help you to secure your company network.