FreeNAS - OpenVPN autologin outside the jail

I needed to setup a vpn tunnel at boot which mounts remote filesystems. Unfortunately, in Freenas, you cannot automatically login a openvpn connection (no auth possible) on the host (outside jails) and you cannot install (ports-)software. A workaround is to install "expect" in a jail and copy the required files to the host. When done, the login can be automated with a script (expect/sh).

make (or in) a jail:

 ssh to the jail
 pkg install expect

note: "tempdir" in the next steps should be reachable/available for the jail host.

mkdir /mnt/tempdir/tcl8.6
cp /usr/local/bin/expect /mnt/tempdir
cp /usr/local/lib/expect5.45/libexpect545.so /mnt/tempdir/ 
cp /usr/local/lib/libtcl86.so.1 /mnt/tempdir/ 
cp -r /usr/local/lib/tcl8.6 /mnt/tempdir/

on host:

cp /mnt/tempdir/libexpect545.so /usr/local/lib/expect5.45/libexpect545.so
cp /mnt/tempdir/libtcl86.so.1 /usr/local/lib/libtcl86.so.1
mkdir /usr/local/lib/tcl8.6
cp -r /mnt/tempdir/tcl8.6/ /usr/local/lib/tcl8.6/

test if expect is working on the jail host:

/usr/local/bin/expect
expect1.1>

now a script can be used to automatically login openvpn

vi /root/startup.sh

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/expect <<EOD
spawn /usr/local/sbin/openvpn openvpn.ovpn
sleep 1
match_max 100000
expect -exact "sername:"
send -- "<username>\r"
expect -exact "assword:"
send -- "<password>\r"
expect eof
EOD

...perform other actions

quit vi

to autostart this script:

vi /conf/base/etc/rc.d/tunnel

#!/bin/sh
#
#PROVIDE: tunnel
#REQUIRE: DAEMON
#KEYWORD: shutdown

. /etc/rc.subr

name=tunnel
rcvar=tunnel_enable

start_cmd="${name}_start"

tunnel_start()
{
/root/startup.sh
}

load_rc_config $name
run_rc_command "$1"

quit vi

chmod 555 tunnel
cp tunnel /etc/rc.d/

add the file to rc.conf

vi /conf/base/etc/rc.conf

add these lines:

 #tunnel
 tunnel_enable="YES"

quit vi

 cp /conf/base/etc/rc.conf /etc/

Reboot and the tunnel should initiate at boot

bakman2/freenas-stuff

FreeNAS - OpenVPN autologin outside the jail