OpenVPN Nameserver for Mapped Network Drives

Question

Good Day,

I have setup a raspberry pi on my internal network as a OpenVPN server. I am able to connect to it on the public IP using the OpenVPN Windows client. basic VPN seems to be working (when i check my public IP, once connected, it is as per the internal networks).

My issue is that mapped network drives are not accessible, for example drives mapped using \\SOME_INTERNAL_SERVER name. I am able to remap these drives using its IP address however I have tools and systems that need it to be mapped on NAME. How can I fix this?

My client.ovpn looks as follows:

client
proto udp
remote vpn.somenetwork.com 1194
dev tun
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
remote-cert-tls server
verify-x509-name server_L4CReiBJ79AjZ4aN name
auth SHA256
auth-nocache
cipher AES-128-GCM
tls-client
tls-version-min 1.2
tls-cipher TLS-ECDHE-ECDSA-WITH-AES-128-GCM-SHA256
setenv opt block-outside-dns # Prevent Windows 10 DNS leak
verb 3
script-security 2                                                                                                       
dhcp-option DNS 10.0.8.1                                                                                           
dhcp-option DOMAIN company.local 

The last 3 lines were added after some stack overflow searching but does not seem to help.

If I could get a better understanding of the issue and what steps I can take to identify the cause that would be helpful.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to push a WINIS server to your client (assuming your local DNS is not already replying with the correct IP addresses for the SOME_INTERNAL_SERVER)

You can add a line like this to the server config file:

push "dhcp-option WINS 10.66.0.8"

Also your client side DNS settings should probably end up being pushed from the server as it's easier to change them once (on the server side) rather than recalling all your clients to change them.

e.g. https://openvpn.net/community-resources/pushing-dhcp-options-to-clients/