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Monday 15 April 2024

Allowing Client to Client connect on VPN

Recently we were trying to debug an application with two developers one backend developer and one frontend developer. We were working in work from home setup so both were working from home.

We were wasting a lots of effort in pushing backed changes again and again to our staging server for testing. We were thinking that it would be great if frontend developer could connect to service running on backend developer's machine directly and debug the problem. We tried connecting using private IP address of backend developer's machine but connection timed out.

Later on we discovered that there was a configuration needed on OpenVpn server. You need to enable following configuration on OpenVpn server to enable client to client connection. We found this functionality to be of a great help in debugging.

client-to-client

Following post was very useful https://serverfault.com/questions/570316/how-can-multiple-clients-of-an-openvpn-server-find-each-other

Same can be achieved in AWS client VPN also https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpn/latest/clientvpn-admin/scenario-client-to-client.html