Configuring OpenVPN on a UniFi Security Gateway

OpenVPN Logo

In my homelab setup I am using UniFi network components and I was looking for a secure way to connect to my environment when I am on the road. After doing some research on the technical implementations, I found that OpenVPN – at least in theory – offers the best security, performance and reliability compared to L2TP / IPSec and PPTP.

There are several guides how to configure this for a UniFi Security Gateway, however, I found that many of them are lacking important information or were wrong. I ‘trial ‘n error’d’ through those guides until I found a setup which is working quite well for me.

Read more

Utilizing Sophos SSL VPN / OpenVPN Startup Scripts

SSL-VPN-Connect-01

I’m travelling and can’t access my network drives! 😡

Have you heard this sentence from angry users? Do you still put the infamous ‘mapping.cmd’ or ‘NetworkDrives.bat’ on your users desktops and they seem to forget about it regularly? Do you want to automate everything that can be automated?

Then you came to the right place. I want to show you how I set up an automatic mapping, which obstacles I had to deal with and get you on the right track. You can adapt the steps from this post to all OpenVPN based VPN clients just as the Sophos SSL client.

Read more

Deploying Windows 10 dynamically using different languages

OSD Language Selection-03

Recently I took part in a project where a client has several branch office locations in 13 different countries total. Two countries required a Windows display language other than English (en-US) and all the employees got physical keyboard layouts matching their countries standard layout.

As a result, I wanted to simplify the configuration of Windows locale settings, display languages, keyboard layouts and time zones. The plan was to set the languages dynamically before the OS deployment starts — to make the lives of my colleagues (and mine hopefully 😉) easier.

I could not find a solution which was working properly for Windows 10 1809. So I tried quite a few approaches and ran into many issues. It tempted me to just download all the different WIM files —  one for every language. Luckily I came up with a better approach and this blog post explains how it works.

Read more