One of many use-cases for network of devices is deployment in a location where devices are accessible safely on a local network. In such cases remote management would present a difficult challenge. To overcome this obstacle signageOS offers an option for devices to connect to a VPN allowing you to remotely access your devices.
In order to enable a VPN on a device you need:
- Your device to be either Fedora or Raspberry Pi
- Core App version higher than:
- 2.5.0 for Fedora
- 2.5.0 for Raspberry Pi
- 2.5.0 for Ubuntu
- Internet connection
Enable VPN on your device
Provision your device following appropriate provisioning guide. Provisioning process for both platforms can be found in our public documentation here (Fedora) and here (RPi).
Once your device is provisioned with the signageOS Core App navigate to our device management platform Box and log in. Under Devices tab find your device.
On the Device detail page click the "Troubleshooting" tab and switch the Device VPN selection to "Enabled", do not forget to save your changes.
If you've done all the listed steps your device should have VPN enabled now. To connect to your device navigate back to "Info" tab.
Information necessary to connect is listed on the right-side column panel, scroll to the connections section and locate the VPN panel.
Accessing the VPN
If you are not sure on how to access the VPN you can follow this guide to let you connect quickly.
Note: You will need a VPN connection client - you can download OpenVPN client for the rest of this guide.
In order to connect to the VPN navigate to your Organization detail page in Box and select the VPN configurations tab. On this tab you can see overview of all profile configuration setups, you can add, delete or list out all the generated configs.
Click the "Add new VPN configuration" button. A new profile configuration will be generated and a prompt to download a configuration profile will be displayed. Save this file to your PC.
Your profile file should be saved and ready to be imported into your VPN Client. When your profile is successfully imported you can now connect to the VPN.
Once your VPN connection is established, you can access the device using its' VPN IP address. For example, if you have an SSH server running on the device, you can access it via SSH in the following manner:
Fedora:
ssh user_name@DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS