VOXL VPN Manual
Table of contents
Overview
A typical use case of an LTE connection is to connect a drone to a Ground Control Station (GCS) such as QGroundControl. Typically the GCS is also connected to an LTE network. In this case, both the drone and the GCS have been assigned IP addresses on the LTE network that are private to the carrier network. This prevents the drone from directly connecting to the GCS since their IP addresses are not visible to each other over the internet.
There are a variety of ways to solve this issue. ModalAI uses a VPN as the preferred solution.
This diagram shows how the VPN solution works. In this example a server is allocated with a static IP address, 35.236.55.229. You can easily set your own server up with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc. Ubuntu is our preferred OS for our servers. Our VPN is setup using the OpenVPN software package.
In the example above, once the drone has connected to the AT&T network, it obtains the IP address 10.47.x.y and the GCS, once connected, obtains the address 10.47.x.z.
With the OpenVPN server software running on the cloud server and OpenVPN client software on both the drone and the GCS, the devices can now connect and get VPN IP address assignments. In this diagram, the drone is assigned 10.8.0.6 and the GCS is assigned 10.8.0.8. The drone can now communicate directly to the GCS using the 10.8.0.8 IP address.
It is desirable for the drone and the GCS to always get the same IP address when connecting to the VPN. This is possible by assigning each separate network endpoint a unique security certificate. When each endpoint connects using it’s certificate it can be configured to receive the same address every time.
OpenVPN client on VOXL
The base VOXL System Image comes with OpenVPN pre-installed
In order to use OpenVPN on VOXL, you will need to supply a configuration file and the certificates / keys for your VPN. These files can be placed in the directory /etc/openvpn.
The following is an example of running OpenVPN as a daemon:
cd /etc/openvpn
openvpn --daemon --script-security 2 --config vpn-key.ovpn
NOTE: The connection to the VPN will fail unless the date and time have been correctly set. This is required due to the dates embedded in the certificates. voxl-time-sync (included in voxl-utils) is a script that will run until the date and time have been set correctly and can be enabled to start on boot.
The default version of OpenVPN on VOXL is 2.1.3. Newer versions are available and compile nicely on target. Here is an example of setting up version 2.4.6:
git clone https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn
cd openvpn
git checkout tags/v2.4.6
autoreconf -i -v -f
./configure --disable-lzo --disable-plugin-auth-pam --prefix=/usr/local
make -j4
make install