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I installed a (private tunnel open)VPN onto a Google Compute Engine VM. Which was my goal, to ensure that any of the VM's activity on the internet would be encrypted.

However, immediately as it was installed I lost connection to the VM. Now I can't ssh back into the machine.

Does anyway know how I could keep the VPN on a VM, yet still maintain access ?

Dave M
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Joe
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  • It should not be an issue to have openvpn running on a VM, so your problem is probably some kind of misconfiguration of the network, or the vpn itself. Try to log in via serial console and check the network settings from there. – Lacek Oct 15 '20 at 15:32
  • Hi Lacek, It's the consumer version of openVPN (point to site), which behaves differently to some of openVPN's other solutions (site to site etc ). Maybe thats why ? Either way, I will try the serial console and update the thread later. Thank you – Joe Oct 15 '20 at 15:42

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I believe that @Lacek is right about some configuration issue and Since Open VPN is all about networking and installing it made your VM incaccessible from outside.

If you can't connect to your VM you have several options;

1. Easy / convinient one - log into another VM in the same VPC network and then try to login from it to your VM using it's internal IP. If you don't have any other VM handy create one (E2 Micro is enough) and use it as a bastion machine. This will work assuming your instance is up and running and has connectivity with the VPC.

2. Fulproof method - connect to serial console of the VM (either via gcp console or gcloud utility. First you have to enable serial access to that VM. This method works even if all network interfaces are down.

Wojtek_B
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