A few months ago I bought a Netgear Nighthawk router (D7000v2), largely because I wanted a router that supported Open VPN so that I could connect up and use Remote Desktop etc when away from my office. I had previously set up something similar by using the Windows VPN server, but wanted something safer and more robust.
It all works pretty well out of the box, but there have been some interesting glitches.
There was a problem with the router screwing up DNS. It seems to be something to do with how they do the initial setup, making routerlogin.net talk to the router, and for a while I always had to switch the VPN server off and on after booting the router to get DNS working (weird, but it seemed to work – I guess it was restarting the DNS somehow). The latest firmware seems to have fixed that, I hope.
More serious was getting the router to generate usable config files. First problem was that it only generates the ovpn files correctly if you are using dynamic DNS. I have a fixed IP address, but rather than use that it created configuration files with 0.0.0.0 as the address. Once I realised, it was easy enough to put the address in.
That worked for my phone, but getting the Windows 10 config it generated to connect is a problem I still haven’t managed to fix. Instead, I’ve found I have to generate a non-Windows (i.e. Linux) config. The trick here, having set the IP address in the conf file, is to rename it as an ovpn file. They seem to be the same format, but the Windows client only sees ovpn files. The Windows client also only imports the ovpn file, so you have to copy the other 3 files, key and certs, into the OVPN config folder yourself.
One further tip, before importing, rename the ovpn file to be the name you want the connection to have. If you forget, you can change it later by going to the OVPN config folder and renaming the folder and ovpn file in there.
The OVPN config folder is “C:\Users\username\OpenVPN\config”.