That is no longer needed and everything you need is available in the GUI. You may find instructions that involve going to Administration => Commands. dd-wrt has made this process so simple now. The storage there is volatile and will not survive a reboot. You’ll need to save the ta.key somewhere off of the TP-LINK. When logged in run openvpn -genkey -secret ta.key The password is the one you set up as an admin password originally. Please note the user is root when ssh-ing into the router. So back it up if you are going to start over.įinally you’ll need a ta.key. If you ever run clean-all again this will be deleted. You’ll now have a very well populated keys directory. build-key client1 This is the client name.

Update the vars file and fill in the country, province, city, org, email, ou.

There are instructions and a detailed explanation of how to use easy-rsa here. You can download easy-rsa to assist with this here. To get openvpn up and running you’ll need to build a set of keys and certificates. In the left navigation go to System Tools -> Firmware Upgrade. The admin user and password are on the back of the device. So you’ll be holding down reset for a full 90 seconds. Plug in the TP-LINK and still holding reset for 30 seconds.Unplug the device while still holding reset for 30 seconds.Once downloaded follow dd-wrt’s 30-30-30 hard reset: If you do find yourself having issues and you are daring you can try out a later image found here. The version as of writing this is v24 pre SP2 build 21061 and I haven’t had any issues. Please know that the published dd-wrt was incompatible with most new models of the 1043 and the WAN port wouldn’t function. Start by downloading ddwrt for the TP-LINK here. Here are my notes for installing dd-wrt and setting up the VPN:

At one point they were selling for just over $30 on. These are nice, little, and importantly, cheap gigabit routers that are easy to upgrade to run dd-wrt. To do this I selected a TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND. For work I had to create a quick VPN link to monitor some instruments off-site.

Pia on dd wrt v24