Masquerade on FreeBSD

Generic babbling

Once in a while I get my hands on a computer with some free resources and I like to build and maintain computer networks. My latest acquisition is Samsung R700, an Intel Core 2 Duo computer from 2009 I got as a present.

It is a pity that most of these machines get left behind. That is why we can find a new application for this machine and get to know how to configure a FreeBSD router running OpenVPN and DNS.

Setup DNS

In order to make the computer act as DNS server we need to configure the server. Usually it's two choices: isc-dhcp-server or dnsmasq. I started with the former back in days, but now I switched more to the latter, as it was included by default with some Linux and I find the syntax generally more concise.

Let's start with setting up OpenVPN on BSD. We can do it with famous pkg tool:

pkg install openvpn

Now it's about time to start the openvpn service. Configuration of services in BSD is done through /etc/rc.conf. Let's add the following line there:

openvpn_enable="YES"

This is how you enable all other services in BSD systems. Next, it's time to create keys and configure clients. You will read about this in part 2...