How to Set Up Inbound Services (NAT Port Forwarding) on Peplink Router with OpenVPN

General
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1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some guidance on setting up Inbound Services (NAT Port Forwarding) on my Peplink router, specifically when using an OpenVPN connection. My Peplink router is acting as a client connected to an external OpenVPN server, and I need to forward traffic from this VPN connection to internal devices.

My Setup:

  • Peplink Model: Balance 310 Fiber 5G
  • Connections: Main WAN interfaces, plus OpenVPN client connection to an external server
  • Goal: Route incoming traffic (e.g., ports 80, 443, 3389) from the OpenVPN connection to specific internal devices on my LAN (172.16.X.X)

Issues:

  • I can’t seem to select the OpenVPN connection as a WAN interface in Inbound Services, so I’m not sure how to set up the port forwarding rules properly for traffic coming through the VPN tunnel.
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Has anyone successfully configured this kind of setup? Is there a way to make the OpenVPN client connection act more like a WAN for easier port forwarding, or any other method to achieve this?

Thanks for your help!

2

To clarify, my Peplink router is connected as a client to my self-hosted OpenVPN server. Other devices are also connecting to this OpenVPN server via LAN or by other means.

I’m trying to set up port forwarding so that devices on the LAN of the OpenVPN server can access devices on the LAN of the Peplink router via the VPN tunnel. Essentially, I want to use inbound port forwarding over the VPN tunnel to allow traffic from the VPN server’s LAN to reach the Peplink LAN.

Any advice on how to configure this properly?

3

Hi, it might be too late, but you need to purchase a license to receive incoming connections through the OpenVPN WAN. The functionality that comes natively with Peplink, from what I’ve been testing, is only for outgoing connections. That means if you connect to your OpenVPN server from a Peplink, if you do a ping from a host of the lan, the connection will be NATed, using the private IP address assigned to you by your OpenVPN server.