Part 2: Raspberry Pi SoftEther Bridge Setup for Maestro Remote Access to your Flex 6000 Radio

Steve - N4TTY

@K6OZY - After looking at settings on the VPN Bridge, it did indeed have the DNS I thought was on the server.  After changing it to match what was on the server, I was able to connect the Bridge via my iPhone to my home network!  I then connected my laptop's Ethernet cable to the Bridge and was able to connect and acquire an IP address on my home network. So then I started SmartSDR and there was the radio!!!

After connecting to the radio, SmartSDR only stayed running for a minute or less before losing its connection to the radio.  And the radio no longer appeared in the radio selection screen.  Strange occurrence, but none the less I got connected to my home network via VPN.  Small steps but making progress!

Steve G./N4TTY

Steve (N9SKM)

Am i correct in assuming that i can use a pi on the remote side to access the built in VPN on my router?

K6OZY

You can but you may not be using softether unless the other side is L2TP or OpenVPN. I am unsure bridging would work either. Too many variables.

Steve (N9SKM)

Roger, My home network is a total mess becasue it is a connection wirelessly bridged from another QTH. I need to get a few things sorted before i even concider remote operation haha.

Steve K9ZW

A big thank you to Chris K6OZY for putting these how-to guides together.

Still have some optimizing to accomplish, but it is so cool to rack up QSOs while at the office via the SoftEther VPN Raspberry Pi !!  





Son Winston KC9FVR helped correct crucial errors I had made, and geeked things into submission.

Very pleased that the project caught his interest, especially so close after finishing semester finals.  

I'll have more pictures on my blog soon!

73

Steve
K9ZW

K6OZY

Thank you! This kind of feedback motivates me to continue these type of guides. I'm glad it worked!

Steve K9ZW

You should take a bow!  

Still need some tinkering and have some questions for after Dayton.

Tunneling a VPN for Maestro is my quick write up.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Lawrence Kellar KB5ZZB

Asus VPN proved to be unstable Spent last night taking my windows 10 tablet and turning it into a softether vpn server. I tested with a couple of other devices and I could surf through them. I suspect I could follow the tutorial from part 2 out? One question: I'm going to be using a Mac to program ( a lack of any spare windows devices around). What and how can I program the pi with it? Putty for Mac? Terminal? Thanks again. Sorry if I'm rambling. I stayed up till 3am getting server going

W1IMD

Chris, is it possible to set up a Raspberry Pi for Softether using the built in GUI? I know nothing of Linux but have used the Windows setup of Softether with a lot of success. Having watched your videos several times, the tasks seem a bit daunting for the uninitiated. I need to set up a server and a bridge for my setup and take the Win 10 computers back for other projects.  Thanks.

Ria

I believe his videos show the GUI. Once you get SoftEther running you can use the GUI. 

Bill / VA3QB

After a week I finally got mine working through my cellphone at home. Next test is to take it to a friends to confirm it works. I had some challenges with softether that I will post later.

Ria

I just did a configuration for a friend, and I'm actually doing the wifi in a different way, whereby you're not tied to hacking config files to select your wifi. 

The wifi setup is similar to the chromecast. Basically the pi will look for a known SSID, then if it doesn't find one it will set up its own access point. Connect to it with your smartphone, select a wifi from the captive portal screen, then it will connect the wifi from there.

So far, so good. Works really well. One other thing I've added is a shutdown button to safely shut down the pi rather than roll the dice with just pulling power. Basically a pull up resistor and SPST switch on one of the GPIO pins and that triggers a python script. This will (hopefully) prevent corruption of the SD card. 

I'll get a script up sometime soon. 

But if you're interested in hacking this yourself, you can look for the radiodan wifi setup package and that is going to be the wifi setup component. The only thing is that it doesn't really do captive portal yet (eg hotel wifi) but I might have a workaround for that too. However I have found that most of them block VPNs anyway so this may be an exercise in futility. 

David Decoons, wo2x

Yep. we tested this last night with my Maestro and it worked well. Ria did an excellent job on the script. Very cool being able to set the Pi WiFi info from the iPhone.

As she stated, the info is available on RadioDan  

Dave wo2x

Ria

This is it:
https://planb.nicecupoftea.org/2016/03/20/wifi-connect-quick-wifi-access-point-to-tell-a-raspberry-p...

They have instructions, just ignore the part about provisioning the SD card and skip straight to checking out the radiodan code. This will pull the code from github and build it, pretty much turn key from there, although it did fail a few times when I tried.

Martin Boroff

Steve

I hope you get notified there is a new post.

I have completed video one and have a soft ether vpn server running on my lan. I have four other locations which host Flex radios. We currently share the credentials. Using Remote Desktop I was able to login to a Windows PC at another location, setup a VPN connection, logout of Smartlink, then when I started SmartSDR I saw the radio at the remote location and the two I have located at my location.

My question concerns seeing up the bridge server. I believe in your video you told the software to use the WiFi connection as its internet connection. Since I have Ethernet ports available at the remote sites can I use the ethernet choice in place of the wifi? Can I do all of this configuring of the bridge at my location and then move the pi to the remote location without addition configuration?