Should I use a VPN with port forwarding?

I have a Windows server behind my NAT router.

I'm trying to access a website on the server that is on port 443. My router says that it's blocked and that I need to use a VPN to access it. The problem is that I don't know how to get my server to run a VPN.

I'm using a D-Link DCS-1206P. I believe it's a 2-wire router. I have a DD-WRT firmware on it. I want to use this router with port forwarding.

Any suggestions I would suggest you use a VPN server instead of a VPN client. You can get a free VPN server with OpenVPN, the main advantage is that you do not need to install or configure anything on your computer. The OpenVPN wiki has some more info on this topic. I think I'll have to download OpenVPN. Thanks for the tip!

It's a little more complicated than that. If you are using a Linux host, you could use a package called Privoxy. There are plenty of guides to getting Privoxy set up.

Another option is to set up a SSH server on your PC. You can install SSH with most Linux distributions. There are several options for how to set up SSH on Windows, but the best is to go to You can also use PuTTY.

Thanks for the tips. I'm thinking of setting up a local server so that I can access the site.

I found this guide at LifeHacker: It gives a pretty good overview of setting up a server on a PC. A few questions. Would it be easier to just go to the site and click the login button? I have a dynamic IP, so that may not be an option. Do you know of any good guides for setting up a web server on a PC? How do you make sure that it doesn't get hit by any malicious code?

Yes, it would be much easier.

Should I use OpenVPN TCP or UDP?

OpenVPN uses UDP port 1194 for its TCP over IP protocol.

Can I use this same port in TCP over IP on the client side, and just keep the 1194 as the UDP service? Or does OpenVPN TCP over IP require a dedicated TCP service port? You can use the same UDP port for both protocols. There's no problem with that.

Also, there's no limit to how many TCP connections you can have (as long as the server has enough CPU). The maximum number of simultaneous TCP connections is however limited.

It is perfectly acceptable to have a UDP connection on the same port as TCP. If you have to support more than one hundred simultaneous connections then you'll need to consider whether it makes sense to implement it as a TCP/IP or UDP/IP connection.

Does OpenVPN have port forwarding?

I know you can do tunneling, but if I'm using dynamic dns and have a laptop with the router, would I be able to open the port through the VPN and use that to forward to my external IP?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to use my current setup of OpenVPN without having to buy an expensive router

I think it's possible, but I'm not sure if you can configure it on an external IP. I'm using OpenVPN in a private network with no NAT or anything. The router only handles traffic to/from the local network

It does. If you look at the OpenVPN config file format, it defines the protocol used for connections between client and server, as well as the authentication used for establishing the connection, and the encryption used for sending/receiving the encrypted data. It defines options to be used on the command line, and config file options (which are specified in a table) as well as which options are given default values. These options can be further expanded into groups of options, which are defined in a similar fashion.